CMAF

Video: Low-latency DASH Streaming Using Open Source Tools

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Low Latency Dash also known as LL-DASH is a modification of MPEG DASH to allow it to operate with close to two seconds’ latency bringing it down to meet, or beat, standard broadcast signals.

Brightcove’s Bo Zhang starts by outlining the aims and methods of getting there. For instance, he explains, the HTTP 1.1 Chunked Transfer element is key to low-latency streaming as it allows the server to start sending a video segment as its being written, not waiting until the file is complete. LL-DASH also has the ability to state an availability window (‘availabilityTimeOffset’).

As LL-MPEG DASH is a living standard, there are updates on the way: Resync points will allow a player to receive a list of places where it can join a stream using SAP types in the ISO-BMFF spec, the server can send a ‘service description’ to the player which can use the information to adjust its latency. Event messages can now be inserted in the middle of segments.

Bo then moves on to explain that he and the team have set up and experiment to gain experience with LL-DASH and test overall latency. He shows that they decided to stream RTMP out of OBS, into a github project called ‘node-gpac-dash’ then to the dash.js player all. between Boston and Seattle. This test runs at 800×600, 30fps with a bitrate of 2.5Mbps and shows results of between 2.5 and 5 seconds depending on the network conditions.

As Bo moves towards the Q&A, he says that low-latency streaming is less scalable because a TCP connection needs to be kept open between the player and the CDN which is a burden.
Another compromise is that smaller chunk sizes in LL-DASH give reduced latency but IO increases meaning sometimes you may have to increase the chunk sizes (and hence latency of the stream) to allow for better performance. He also adds that adverts are more difficult with low-latency streams due to the short amount of time to request and receive the advertising.

Watch now!</a
More detail about the experiments in this talk can be found in Bo’s blog post.
Speakers

Bo Zhang Bo Zhang
Staff Video System Engineer, Research
Brightcove

Video: CMAF And The Future Of OTT

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Why is CMAF still ‘the future’ of OTT? Published in 2018, CMAF’s been around for a while now so what are the challenges and hurdles holding up implementation? Are there reasons not to use it at all? CMAF is a way of encoding and packaging media which then can be sent using MPEG DASH and HLS, the latter being the path Disney+ has chosen, for instance.

This panel from Streaming Media West Connect, moderated by Jan Ozer, discusses CMAF use within Akami, Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu. Peter Chave from Akamai starts off making the point that CMAF is important to CDNs because if companies are able to use just one CMAF file as the source for different delivery formats, this reduces storage costs for consumers and makes each individual file more popular thus increasing the chance of having a file available in the CDN (particularly at the edge) and reducing cache misses. They’ve had to do some work to ensure that CMAF is carried throughout the CDN efficiently and ensuring the manifests are correctly checked.

Disney+, explains Bill Zurat, is 100% HLS CMAF. Benefiting from the long experience of the Disney Streaming Services teams (formerly BAMTECH), but also from setting up a new service, Disney were able to bring in CMAF from the start. There are issues ensuring end-device support, but as part of the launch, a number were sunsetted which didn’t have the requirements necessary to support either the protocol or the DRM needed.

Hulu is an aggregator so they have strong motivation to normalise inputs, we hear from Hulu’s Nick Brookins. But they also originate programming along with live streaming so CMAF has an important to play on the way in and the way out. Hulu dynamically regenerates their manifests so can iterate as they roll out easily. They are currently part the way through the rollout and will achieve full CMAF compatibility within the next 18 months.

The conversation turns to DRM. CMAF supports two methods of DRM known as CTR (adopted by Apple) and CBC (also known as CBCS) which has been adopted by others. AV1 supports both, but the recommendation has been to use CBC which appears have been universally followed to date explains Netflix’s Cyril Concolato. Netflix have been using AV1 since it was finalised and are aiming to have most titles transitioned by 2021 to CMAF.

Peter comments from Akamai’s position that they see a number of customers who, like Disney+ and Peacock, have been able to enter the market recently and move straight into CMAF, but there is a whole continuum of companies who are restricted by their workflows and viewer’s devices in moving to CMAF.

Low latency streaming is one topic which invigorates minds and debates for many in the industry. Netflix, being purely video on demand, they are not interested in low-latency streaming. However, Hulu is as is Disney Streaming Services, but Bill cautions us on rushing to the bottom in terms of latency. Quality of experience is improved with extra latency both in terms of reduced rebuffering and, in some cases, picture quality. Much of Disney Streaming Services’ output needs to match cable, rather than meeting over-the-air latencies or less.

The panel session finishes with a quick-fire round of questions from Jan and the audience covering codec strategy, whether their workflows have changed to incorporate CMAF, just-in-time vs static packaging, and what customers get out of CMAF.

Watch now!
Speakers

Cyril Concolato Cyril Concolato
Senior Software Engineer,
Netflix
Peter Chave Peter Chave
Principal Architect,
Akamai
Nick Brookins Nick Brookins
VP, Platform Services Group,
Hulu
Bill Zurat Bill Zurat
VP, Core Technology
Disney Streaming Services
Jan Ozer Moderator: Jan Ozer
Contributing Editor, Streaming Media
Owner, StreamingLearningCenter.com

Video: Web Media Standards

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The internet has been a continuing story of proprietary technologies being overtaken by open technologies, from the precursors to TCP/IP, to Flash/RTMP video delivery, to HLS. Understanding the history of why these technologies appear, why they are subsumed by open standards and how boost in popularity that happens at that transition is important to help us make decisions now and foresee how the technology landscape may look in five or ten years’ time.

This talk, by Jonn Simmons, is a talk of two halves. Looking first at the history of how our standards coalesced into what we have today will fill in many blanks and make the purpose of current technologies like MPEG DASH & CMAF clearer. He then looks at how we can understand what we have today in light of similar situations in the past answering the question of whether we are at an inflexion point in technology.

John first looks at the importance of making DRM-protected content portable in the same way as non-protected content was easy to move between computers and systems. This was in response to a WIPO analysis which, as many would agree, concluded that this was essential to enable legal video use on the internet. In 2008, Mircosoft analysed all the elements needed, beyond the simple encryption, to allow such media to be portable. It would require HTML extensions for delivery, DRM signalling, authentication, a standard protocol for Adaptive Delivery (also known as ABR) and an adaptive container format. We then take a walk through the timeline starting in 2009 through to 2018 seeing the beginnings and published availability of such technologies Common Encryption, MPEG DASH and CMAF.

Milestones for Web Media Portability

John then walks through these key technologies starting with the importance of Common Encryption (also known as CENC). Previously all the DRM methods had their own container formats. Harmonisation of DRM is, likely, never going to happen so we’ll always have Apple’s own, Google’s own, Microsoft’s and plenty of others. For streaming providers, it’s a major problem to deliver all the different formats and makes for messy, duplicative workflows. Common Encryption allows for one container format which can contain any DRM information allowing for a single workflow with different inputs. On the player side, the player can, now, simply accept a single stream of DRM information, authenticate with the appropriate service and decode the video.

CMAF is another key technology called out by John in enabling portability of media. It was co-developed with Apple to enable a common media format for HLS and DASH. We’ve covered this before on The Broadcast Knowledge starting with the ISO BMFF format on which DASH and CMAF are based, Will Law’s famous ‘Chunky Monkey’ talk and many more. We recently covered FuboTV’s talk on how they distribute HLS & DASH multi-codec encoding and packaging.

Also highlighted by John. are the JavasScript Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions which allow interaction from browsers/JavaScript with both ABR/Adaptive Streaming and DRM. He then talks about CTA WAVE which is a project that specifically aims to improve streamed media experiences on consumer devices, CTA being the Consumer Technology Association who are behind the annual CES exhibition in Las Vegas.

What is often less apparent is the current work happening developing new standards and specifications. John calls out a number of different projects within W3C and MPEG such as Low latency support for CMAF, MSE and codec switching in MSE. Work on ad signalling period boundaries and SCTE-35 is making its debut into JavaScript with some ongoing work to create the link between ad markers and JS applications. He also calls out VVC and AV1 mappings into CMAF.

In the second part of the presentation, John asked ‘where will we end up?’ John draws upon two examples. One is the number of TCP/IP hosts between 1980 and 1992. He shows it was clear that when TCP/IP was publicly available there was an exponential increase in adoption of TCP/IP, moving on from proprietary network interfaces available in the years before. Similarly with websites between 1990 and 1997. Exponential growth happened after 1993 when the standard was set for Web Clients. This did take a few years to have a marked effect, but the number of websites moved from a flat ‘less than 100’ number to 600, then 10,000 in 1994 increasing to a quarter of a million by 1995 and then over one million in 1996. This shows the difference between the power ‘walled garden’ environments and the open internet.

John sees media technology today as still having a number of ‘traditional’ walled gardens such as DISH and Sky TV. He sees people self-serving multiple walled gardens to create their own larger pool of media options, typically known as ‘cord cutters’. He, therefore, sees two options for the future. One is ever larger walled gardens where large companies aggregate the content of smaller content owners/providers. The other option is having cloud services that act as a one-stop-shop for your media, but dynamically authenticate against whichever service is needed. This is a much more open environment without the need to be separately subscribing to each and every outlet in the traditional sense.

Watch now!
Speakers

John Simmons John Simmons
W3C Evangelist, Media & Entertainment
W3C

Video: Low Latency Live Streaming At Scale

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Low latency can be a differentiator for a live streaming service, or just a way to ensure you’re not beaten to the punch by social media or broadcast TV. Either way, it’s seen as increasingly important for live streaming to be punctual breaking from the past where latencies of thirty to sixty seconds were not uncommon. As the industry has matured and connectivity has enough capacity for video, simply getting motion on the screen isn’t enough anymore.

Steve Heffernan from MUX takes us through the thinking about how we can deliver low latency video both into the cloud and out to the viewers. He starts by talking about the use cases for sub-second latency – anything with interaction/conversations – and how that’s different from low-latency streaming which is one to many, potentially very large scale distribution. If you’re on a video call with ten people, then you need sub-second latency else the conversation will suffer. But distributing to thousands or millions of people, the sacrifice in potential rebuffering of operating sub-second, isn’t worth it, and usually 3 seconds is perfectly fine.

Steve talks through the low-latency delivery chain starting with the camera and encoder then looking at the contribution protocol. RTMP is still often the only option, but increasingly it’s possible to use WebRTC or SRT, the latter usually being the best for streaming contribution. Once the video has hit the streaming infrastructure, be that in the cloud or otherwise, it’s time to look at how to build the manifest and send the video out. Steve talks us through the options of Low-Latency HLS (LHLS) CMAF DASH and Apple’s LL-HLS. Do note that since the talk, Apple removed the requirement for HTTP/2 push.

The talk finishes off with Steve looking at the players. If you don’t get the players logic right, you can start off much farther behind than necessary. This is becoming less of a problem now as players are starting to ‘bend time’ by speeding up and slowing down to bring their latency within a certain target range. But this only underlines the importance of the quality of your player implementation.

Watch now!
Speaker

Steve Heffernan Steve Heffernan
Founder & Head of Product, MUX
Creator of video.js