Help save the planet: please do adjust your picture

Allowing digital video users to make choices of picture size and codec would significantly reduce energy usage, electricity costs and the carbon footprint of Internet users. Our empirical investigation shows a difference of up to a factor of 3 in energy usage for video decoding using different codecs at the same picture size and bitrate, on a desktop client system. With video traffic already responsible for the largest and fastest growing proportion of traffic on the Internet, a significant amount of energy, money and carbon output is due to video. We present a simple methodology and metrics that can be used to give an intuitive, quantitative and comparable assessment of the energy usage of video decoding. Providing energy usage information to users would empower them to make sensible choices. We demonstrate how small energy savings for individual client systems could give significant energy savings when considered at a global scale.