  The delivery and display of 360-degree videos on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs)
presents many technical challenges. 360-degree videos are ultra high resolution
spherical videos, which contain an omnidirectional view of the scene. However
only a portion of this scene is displayed on the HMD. Moreover, HMD need to
respond in 10 ms to head movements, which prevents the server to send only the
displayed video part based on client feedback. To reduce the bandwidth waste,
while still providing an immersive experience, a viewport-adaptive 360-degree
video streaming system is proposed. The server prepares multiple video
representations, which differ not only by their bit-rate, but also by the
qualities of different scene regions. The client chooses a representation for
the next segment such that its bit-rate fits the available throughput and a
full quality region matches its viewing. We investigate the impact of various
spherical-to-plane projections and quality arrangements on the video quality
displayed to the user, showing that the cube map layout offers the best quality
for the given bit-rate budget. An evaluation with a dataset of users navigating
360-degree videos demonstrates that segments need to be short enough to enable
frequent view switches.
