A Dataset for Understanding Open UGC Video Datasets

User Generated Content (UGC) video streaming is a major application on the Internet. Even small bitrate savings can have large network impacts at this scale. In order to achieve improvements without sacrificing experience, the quality of UGC videos needs to be better understood. In recent years video quality evaluation models designed for the evaluation of UGC videos have received a lot of attention. However, considering that these models are learning-based models, they heavily depend on the training data that has been used. In this paper, a new dataset is introduced that allows studying the differences in characteristics between existing UGC video datasets. It reveals the range of quality that was covered by existing UGC video datasets, and the implication of these quality ranges on training and validation performance of UGC video quality prediction models. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that dataset alignment enables existing UGC models to achieve higher performance. This alignment dataset can be found openly available on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12155934).