We all have been there, right? Staring at the screen of our tablet, smartphone, or laptop while getting angry as the video undergoes buffering with that little colored dial making rounds with the picture frozen. This generally happens when someone on the Wi-Fi is hogging the bandwidth, and you end up shouting to ask them to stop so that you can get to watch the video. A solution to this problem has been created in the form of the Minerva system.
Minerva system comes from a team of experts hailing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The Minerva system analyzes the videos before they are streamed to see how the quality will be if the videos were displayed at a lower resolution.
Wi-Fi and streaming services work by distributing the available bandwidth among the number of online users. This means that if you are trying to watch Jessica Jones on Netflix in HD while your kids are trying to watch their favorite YouTube user; you will end up with pixelated views, pauses, and infuriatingly slow streaming. This is where Minerva comes in with its creative design. It will analyze all of the videos and then ascertain, which would benefit from more bandwidth while determining which one will be found using a lower resolution without compromising on the quality.
The bandwidth is then redistributed to the different users based on the analysis. Furthermore, it continues to adjust itself as the movie, or the show continues. Upon application, Minerva was capable of reducing the rebuffering time by 50% and 1/3rd of the time it enhanced the video playback quality. The system is not only intended for household Wi-Fi users. Netflix or Hulu can make use of this system as well. The best thing about the Minerva system is that no hardware changes need to be executed.