Subjective Evaluation of Frame Rate in Bitrate-Constrained Live Streaming

Abstract

Bandwidth constraints in live streaming require video codecs to balance compression strength and frame rate, yet the perceptual consequences of this trade-off remain underexplored. We present the high frame rate live streaming (HFR-LS) dataset, comprising 384 subject-rated 1080p videos encoded at multiple target bitrates by systematically varying compression strength and frame rate. A single-stimulus, hidden-reference subjective study shows that frame rate has a noticeable effect on perceived quality, and interacts with both bitrate and source content. The HFR-LS dataset is available at https://github.com/real-hjq/HFR-LS to facilitate research on bitrate-constrained live streaming.