Experiment to characterize videos stored on the Web

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Abstract
The design of file systems is strongly influenced by measuring the use of existing file systems, such file size distribution and patterns of access. We believe that a similar characterization of video stored on the Internet will help network engineers, codec designers, and other multimedia researchers. We therefore executed an experiment to measure how video data is used on the Web today. In this experiment, we downloaded and analyzed over 57,000 AVI, QuickTime and MPEG files stored on the Web -- approximately 100 gigabytes of data. Among our more interesting discoveries, we found that the most common video technology in use today is QuickTime, and that the image resolution and frame rate of video files that include audio are much more uniform than video-only files. The majority of all audio/video files have dimensions of CIF or QCIF (or very similar) at 10, 12, 15, or 30 fps, whereas the dimensions and frame rates of video-only files are more uniformly distributed. We also experimentally verified the conjecture that current Internet bandwidth is at least an order of magnitude too slow to support streaming playback of video. We present these results and other statistical information characterizing video on the web in this paper.

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