CMAF Archives – Page 3 of 10 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Bandwidth Prediction for Multi-Bitrate Streaming at Low Latency

Posted on 24th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Low latency protocols like CMAF are wreaking havoc with traditional ABR algorithms. We’re having to come up with new ways of assessing if we’re running out of bandwidth. Traditionally, this is done by looking at how long a video chunk takes to download and comparing that with its playback duration. If you’re downloading at the same speed it’s playing, it’s time consider changing stream to a lower-bandwidth one.

As latencies have come down, servers will now start sending data from the beginning of a chunk as it’s being written which means it’s can’t be downloaded any quicker. To learn more about this, look at our article on ISO BMFF and this streaming primer. Since the file can’t be downloaded any quicker, we can’t ascertain if we should move up in bitrate to a better quality stream, so while we can switch down if we start running out of bandwidth, we can’t find a time to go up.

Ali C. Begen and team have been working on a way around this. The problem is that with the newer protocols, you pre-request files which start getting sent when they are ready. As such you don’t actually know the time the chunk starts downloading to you. Whilst you know when it’s finished, you don’t have access, via javascript, to when the file started being sent to you robbing you of a way of determining the download time.

Ali’s algorithm uses the time the last chunk finished downloading in place of the missing timestamp figuring that the new chunk is going to load pretty soon after the old. Now, looking at the data, we see that the gap between one chunk finishing and the next one starting does vary. This lead Ali’s team to move to a sliding window moving average taking the last 3 download durations into consideration. This is assumed to be enough to smooth out some of those variances and provides the data to allow them to predict future bandwidth and make a decision to change bitrate or not. There have been a number of alternative suggestions over the last year or so, all of which perform worse than this technique called ACTE.

In the last section of this talk, Ali explores the entry he was part of into a Twitch-sponsored competition to keep playback latency close to a second in test conditions with varying bitrate. Playback speed is key to much work in low-latency streaming as it’s the best way to trim off a little bit of latency when things are going well and allows you to buy time if you’re waiting for data; the big challenge is doing it without the viewer noticing. The entry used a heuristics and a machine learning approach which worked so well, they were runners up in the contest.

Watch now!
Speaker

Ali C. Begen,
Technical Consultant, Comcast
Professor, Computer Science, Özyeğin University

Video: HLS and DASH Multi-Codec Encoding & Packaging

Posted on 10th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As we saw yesterday, there’s an increasingly buoyant market for video codecs and whilst this is a breath of fresh air after AVC’s multi-decade dominance, we will likely never again see a market which isn’t fragmented with several dominant players, say AV1, AVC, VVC and VP9, each sharing 85% market share relatively equally and then ‘the rest’ bringing up the rear. So multi-codec distribution to home viewers is going to have to deal with delivering different codecs to different people.

fuboTV do this today and Nick Krzemienski is here to tell us how. Starting with an overview of fuboTV primarily streams both live and on VOD. Nick shows us the workflow they use and then explains how their AVC & HEVC combined workflow is set up. Starting with the ideal case where a single fmp4 is encoded into both AVD and HEVC, he proposes you would simply package both into an HLS and DASH manifest and let players work out the rest. Depending on your players, you may have to split out your manifests into single-codec files.

DRM’s very important for a sports broadcaster so Nick looks at how this might be achieved. CMAF allows you to deliver m3u8 and mpd files using CENC (Common ENCryption). This promises a single DRM process ahead of packaging, but the reality, we hear from Nick, is that you’ll need two sets of media for HLS and DASH if you’re going to use CENC.

When you’re delivering multiple manifest and, hence, multiple sources, how do you manage this? Nick outlines, and shows the code, of how he achieves this at the edge. Using Lamda, he’s able to look at the incoming requests and existing files at the CDN to deliver the right asset with the logic done close to the viewer. Nick closes by with his thoughts on the future for streaming and answering questions from the audience.

Watch now!
Download the presentation
Speakers

	Nick Krzemienski Engineering Lead, VOD Encoding & Operations, fuboTV Maintainer & Editor, awesome.video
	Host: Dom Robinson Director and Creative Firestarter, id3as Contributing Editor, StreamingMedia.com, UK

Video: Tech Talks: Low-Latency Live Streaming

Posted on 18th May 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are a number of techniques for achieving low-latency streaming. This talk is one of the few which introduces them in easy to understand ways and then puts them in context briefly showing the manifests or javascript examples of how these would be seen in the wild. Whilst there are plenty of companies who don’t need low-latency streaming, for many it’s a key part of their offering or it’s part of the business model itself. Knowing the techniques in play is to better understand internet streaming in general.

Jameson Steiner from Bitmovin starts by explaining why there is a motivation to cut the latency. One big motivation, aside from the standard live sports examples, is user-generated content like on Twitch where it’s very clear to the streamer, and quite off-putting, when there is large amounts of delay. Whilst delay can be adapted to, the more there is the less interaction is possible. In this situation, it’s the ‘handwaving’ latency that comes in to play. You want the hand on the screen to wave pretty much at the same time as your hand waves in front of the camera. Jameson places different types of distribution on a chart showing latency and we see that low-latency of 5 seconds or less will not only match traditional TV broadcasts, but also work well for live streamers.

Naturally, to fix a problem you need to understand the problem, so Jameson breaks down the legacy methods of delivery to show why the latency exists. The issue comes down to how video is split into sections, say 6 seconds, so that the player downloads a section at a time, reassembles and plays them. Looking from the player’s perspective, if the network suddenly broke or reduced its throughput, it makes sense to have several chunks in reserve. Having three 6-second chunks, a sensible precaution, makes you 18 seconds behind the curve from the off.

Clearly reducing the segement size is a winner in this scenario. Three 3 second segments will give you just 9 seconds latency; why not go to 1 second? Well encoding inefficiency is one reason. If you reduce the amount of time a temporal codec has of a video, its efficiency will drop and bitrate will increase to maintain quality. Jameson explains the other knock-on effects such as CDN inefficiencies and network requests. The standardised way to avoid these problems is to use CMAF (Common Media Application Format) which is based on MPEG DASH and ISO BMFF. CMAF, and DASH in general, has the benefit of coming from a standards body whose aim was to remove vendor lock-in that may be felt with HLS and was certainly felt with RTMP. Check out MPEG’s short white paper on the topic (zipped .docx file)

CMAF uses chunked transfer meaning that as the encoder writes the data to the disk, the web server sends it to the client. This is different to the default where a file is only sent after it’s been completely written. This has the effect of the not having to wait up to 6 seconds to a 6-second chunk to start being sent; the download time also needs to be counted. Rather, almost as soon as the chunk has been finished by the encoder, it’s arrived at the destination. This is a feature of HTTP 1.1 and after so is not new, but it still needs to be enabled and considered as part of the delivery.

CMAF goes beyond simple HTTP 1.1 chunked transfer which is a technique used in low-latency HLS, covered later, by creating extra structure within the 6-second segment (until now, called a chunk in this article). This extra structure allows the segment to be downloaded in smaller chunks decoupling the segment length from the player latency. Chunked transfer does cause a notable problem however which has not yet been conclusively solved. Jameson explains how traditionally each large segment typically arrives faster than realtime. By measuring how fast it arrives, given the player knows the duration, it can estimate the bandwidth available at that time on the network. With chunked transfer, as we saw, we are receiving data as it’s being created. By definition, we are now getting it in realtime so there is no opportunity to receive it any quicker. The bandwidth estimation element, as shown the presentation, is used to work out if the player needs to go down or could go up to another stream at a different bitrate – part of standard ABR. So the catastrophe here is the going down in latency has hampered our ability to switch bitrates and whilst the viewer can see the video close to real-time, who’s to say if they are seeing it at the best quality?

Low-Latency HLS/DASH is a way of extending DASH and HLS without using CMAF. Jameson explains some techniques such as advertising segments in advance to allow players to pre-request. It also relies on finding the compromise point of encoding inefficiency vs segment length, typically held to be around 2 seconds, to minimise the latency. At this point we start seeing examples of the techniques in manifests and javascript allowing us to understand how this is actually signalled and implemented.

Apple is on its second major revision of LL-HLS which has responded to many of the initial complaints from the community. Whilst it can use HTTP/2 to help push segments out, this caused problems in practice so it can now preload hints, as Jameson explains in order to remove round-trip times from requests. Jameson looks at the other of Apple’s techniques and shows how they look in manifest files.

The final section looks at problems in implementing these features such as chunks being fragmented across TCP packets, the bandwidth estimation question and dealing with playback speed in order to adjust the players position in time – speed-ups and slow-downs of 5 to 10% can be possible depending on content.

Watch now!
Download the presentation
Speaker

Jameson Steiner
Software Engineer,
Bitmovin

Video: DASH: from on-demand to large scale live for premium services

Posted on 6th April 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A bumper video here with 7 short talks from VideoLAN, Will Law and Hulu among others, all exploring the state of MPEG DASH today, the latest developments and the hot topics such as low latency, ad insertion, bandwidth prediction and one red-letter feature of DASH – multi-DRM.

The first 10 minutes sets the scene introducing the DASH Industry Forum (DASH IF) and explaining who takes part and what it does. Thomas Stockhammer, who is chair of the Interoperability Working Group explains that DASH IF is made of companies, headline members including Google, Ericsson, Comcast and Thomas’ employer Qualcomm who are working to promote the adoption of MPEG-DASH by working to improve the specification, advise on how to put it into practice in real life, promote interoperability, and being a liaison point for other standards bodies. The remaining talks in this video exemplify the work which is being done by the group to push the technology forward.

Meeting Live Broadcast Requirements – the latest on DASH low latency!
Akamai’s Will Law takes to the mic next to look at the continuing push to make low-latency streaming available as a mainstream option for services to use. Will Law has spoken about about low latency at Demuxed 2019 when he discussed the three main file-based to deliver low latency DASH, LHLS and LL-HLS as well as his famous ‘Chunky Monkey’ talk where he explains how CMAF, an implementation of MPEG-DASH, works in light-hearted detail.

In today’s talk, Will sets out what ‘low latency’ is and revises how CMAF allows latencies of below 10 seconds to be achieved. A lot of people focus on the duration of the chunks in reducing latency and while it’s true that it’s hard to get low latency with 10-second chunk sizes, Will puts much more emphasis on the player buffer rather than the chunk size themselves in producing a low-latency stream. This is because even when you have very small chunk sizes, choosing when to start playing (immediately or waiting for the next chunk) can be an important part of keeping the latency down between live and your playback position. A common technique to manage that latency is to slightly increase and decrease playback speed in order to manage the gap without, hopefully, without the viewer noticing.

Chunk-based streaming protocols like HLS make Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) relatively easy whereby the player monitors the download of each chunk. If the, say, 5-second chunk arrives within 0.25 seconds, it knows it could safely choose a higher-bitrate chunk next time. If, however, the chunk arrives in 4.8 seconds, it can choose to the next chunk to be lower-bitrate so as to receive the chunk with more headroom. With CMAF this is not easy to do since the segments all arrive in near real-time since the transferred files represent very small sections and are sent as soon as they are created. This problem is addressed in a later talk in this talk.

To finish off, Will talks about ‘Resync Elements’ which are a way of signalling mid-chunk IDRs. These help players find all the points which they can join a stream or switch bitrate which is important when some are not at the start of chunks. For live streams, these are noted in the manifest file which Will walks through on screen.

Ad Insertion in Live Content:Pre-, Mid- and Post-rolling
Whilst not always a hit with viewers, ads are important to many services in terms of generating the revenue needed to continue delivering content to viewers. In order to provide targeted ads, to ensure they are available and to ensure that there is a record of which ads were played when, the ad-serving infrastructure is complex. Hulu’s Zachary Cava walks us through the parts of the infrastructure that are defined within DASH such as exchanging information on ‘Ad Decision Parameters’ and ad metadata.

In chunked streams, ads are inserted at chunk boundaries. This presents challenges in terms of making sure that certain parameters are maintained during this swap which is given the general name of ‘Content Splice Conditioning.’ This conditioning can align the first segment aligned with the period start time, for example. Zachary lays out the three options provided for this splice conditioning before finishing his talk covering prepared content recommendations, ad metadata and tracking.

Bandwidth Prediction for Multi-bitrate Streaming at Low Latency
Next up is Comcast’s Ali C. Begen who follows on from Will Law’s talk to cover bandwidth prediction when operating at low-latency. As an example of the problem, let’s look at HTTP/1.1 which allows us to download a file before it’s finished being written. This allows us to receive a 10-second chunk as it’s being written which means we’ll receive it at the same rate the live video is being encoded. As a consequence, the time each chunk takes to arrive will be the same as the real-time chunk duration (in this example, 10 seconds.) When you are dealing with already-written chunks, your download time will be dependent on your bandwidth and therefore the time can be an indicator of whether your player should increase or decrease the bitrate of the stream it’s pulling. Getting back this indicator for low-latency streams is what Ali presents in this talk.

Based on this paper Ali co-authored with Christian Timmerer, he explains a way of looking at the idle time between consecutive chunks and using a sliding window to generate a bandwidth prediction.

Implementing DASH low latency in FFmpeg
Open-source developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf who is well known for his work on VLC discusses his work writing an MPEG-DASH implementation for FFmpeg called the DASH-LL. He explains how it works and who to use it with examples. You can copy and paste the examples from the pdf of his talk.

Managing multi-DRM with DASH
The final talk, ahead of Q&A is from NAGRA discussing the use of DRM within MPEG-DASH. MPEG-DASH uses Common Encryption (CENC) which allows the DASH protocol to use more than one DRM scheme and is typically seen to allow the use of ‘FairPlay’, ‘Widevine’ and ‘PlayReady’ encryption schemes on a single stream dependent on the OS of the receiver. There is complexity in having a single server which can talk to and negotiate signing licences with multiple DRM services which is the difficulty that Lauren Piron discusses in this final talk before the Q&A led by Ericsson’s VP of international standards, Per Fröjdh.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Thomas Stockhammer Director of Technical Standards, Qualcomm
	Will Law Chief Architect, Akamai
	Zachary Cava Software Architect, Hulu
	Ali C. Begen Technical Consultant, Video Architecture, Strategy and Technology group, Comcast
	Jean-Baptiste Kempf President & Lead VLC Developer VideoLAN
	Laurent Piron Principal Solution Architect NAGRA
	Moderator: Per Fröjdh VP International Standards, Ericsson

Subscribe to get daily updates