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

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

Video: Encoding and packaging for DVB-I services

There are many ways of achieving a hybrid of OTT-delivered and broadcast-delivered content, but they are not necessarily interoperable. DVB aims to solve the interoperability issue, along with the problem of service discovery with DVB-I. This specification was developed to bring linear TV over the internet up to the standard of traditional broadcast in terms of both video quality and user experience.

DVB-I supports any device with a suitable internet connection and media player, including TV sets, smartphones, tablets and media streaming devices. The medium itself can still be satellite, cable or DTT, but services are encapsulated in IP. Where both broadband and broadcast connections are available, devices can present an integrated list of services and content, combining both streamed and broadcast services.

DVB-I standard relies on three components developed separately within DVB: the low latency operation, multicast streaming and advanced service discovery. In this webinar, Rufael Mekuria from Unified Streaming focuses on low latency distributed workflow for encoding and packaging.

 

The process starts with an ABR (adaptive bit rate) encoder responsible for producing streams with multiple bit rates and clear segmentation – this allows clients to automatically choose the best video quality depending on available bandwidth. Next step is packaging where streaming manifests are added and content encryption is applied, then data is distributed through origin servers and CDNs.

Rufael explains that low latency mode is based on an enhancement to the DVB-DASH streaming specification known as DVB Bluebook A168. This incorporates the chunked transfer encoding of the MPEG CMAF (Common Media Application Format), developed to enable co-existence between the two principle flavors of adaptive bit rate streaming: HLS and DASH. Chunked transfer encoding is a compromise between segment size and encoding efficiency (shorter segments make it harder for encoders to work efficiently). The encoder splits the segments into groups of frames none of which requires a frame from a later group to enable decoding. The DASH packager then puts each group of frames into a CMAF chunk and pushes it to the CDN. DVB claims this approach can cut end-to-end stream latency from a typical 20-30 seconds down to 3-4 seconds.

The other topics covered are: encryption (exhanging key parameters using CPIX), content insertion, metadata, supplemental descriptors, TTML subitles and MPD proxy.

Watch now!

Download the slides.

Speaker

Rufael Mekuria Rufael Mekuria
Head of Research & Standardization
Unified Streaming

Video: Low Latency Streaming

There are two phases to reducing streaming latency. One is to optimise the system you already have, the other is to move to a new protocol. This talk looks at both approaches achieving parity with traditional broadcast media through optimisation and ‘better than’ by using CMAF.

In this video from the Northern Waves 2019 conference, Koen van Benschop from Deutsche Telekom examines the large and low-cost latency savings you can achieve by optimising your current HLS delivery. With the original chunk sizes recommended by Apple being 10 seconds, there are still many services out there which are starting from a very high latency so there are savings to be had.

Koen explains how the total latency is made up by looking at the decode, encode, packaging and other latencies. We quickly see that the player buffer is one of the largest, the second being the encode latency. We explore the pros and cons of reducing these and see that the overall latency can fall to or even below traditional broadcast latency depending, of course, on which type (and which country’s) you are comparing it too.

While optimising HLS/DASH gets you down to a few seconds, there’s a strong desire for some services to beat that. Whilst the broadcasters themselves may be reticent to do this, not wanting to deliver online services quicker than their over-the-air offerings, online sports services such as DAZN can make latency a USP and deliver better value to fans. After all, DAZN and similar services benefit from low-second latency as it helps bring them in line with social media which can have very low latency when it comes to key events such as goals and points being scored in live matches.

Stefan Arbanowski from Fraunhofer leads us through CMAF covering what it is, the upcoming second edition and how it works. He covers its ability to use .m3u8 (from HLS) and .mpd (from DASH) playlist/manifest files and that it works both with fMP4 and ISO BMFF. One benefit from DASH is it’s Common Encryption standard. Using this it can work with PlayReady DRM, Fairplay and others.

Stefan then takes a moment to consider WebRTC. Given it proposes latency of less than one second, it can sound like a much better idea. Stefan outlines concerns he has about the ability to scale above 200,000 users. He then turns his attention back to CMAF and outlines how the stream is composed and how the player logic works in order to successfully play at low latency.

Watch now!
Speakers

Koen van Benschop Koen van Benschop
Senior Manager TV Headend and DRM,
Deutsche Telekom
Stefan Arbanowski Stefan Arbanowski
Director Future Applications and Media,
Fraunhofer FOKUS

Webinar: DVB-DASH


Date: 13th June 2018, 14:00 BST
DVB-DASH, for the delivery of TV content via HTTP adaptive streaming, provides a profile of features defined in the MPEG DASH specification. The latest revision of DVB-DASH, published by ETSI in March 2018, adds features related to UHD.

This webinar will have three sections:

General introduction to DVB-DASH (TS 103 285 1.2.1)
DVB-DASH player conformance points (TS 101 154 2.4.1)
Deployments and use cases
Those following the webinar live will have an opportunity to post questions to the presenters.

Speakers:

Simon Waller, Chief Standards Engineer at Samsung Electronics Research Institute UK
Chris Poole, Lead Research Engineer at BBC R&D
Martin Schmalohr, Researcher at IRT