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Video: Adaptive Bit Rate video delivery (MPEG-DASH)

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

MPEG-DASH has been in increasing use for many years and while the implementations and versions continue to improve and add new features, the core of its function remains the same and is the topic of this talk.

For anyone looking for an introduction to multi-bitrate streaming, this talk from Thomas Kernen is a great start as he charts the way streaming has progressed from the initial ‘HTTP progressive download’ to dynamic streaming which adapts to your bandwidth constraints.

Thomas explains the way that players and servers talk and deliver files and summarises the end-to-end distribution ecosystem. He covers the fact that MPEG DASH standardises the container description information, captioning and other aspects. DRM is available through the common encryption scheme.

MPD files, the manifest text files, which are the core of MPEG-DASH are next under the spotlight. Thomas talks us through the difference between Media Presentations, Periods, Representations and Segment Info. We then look at the ability to use the ISO BMFF format or MPEG-2 TS like HLS.

The DASH Industry Forum, DASH-IF, is an organisation which promotes the use of DASH within businesses which means that not only do they do work in spreading the word of what DASH is and how it can be helpful, but they also support interoperability. DASH264 is also the output from the DASH-IF and Thomas describes how this specification of using DASH helps with interoperability.

Buffer bloat is still an issue today which is a phenomenon where for certain types of traffic, the buffers upstream and locally in someone’s network can become perpetually full resulting in increased latency in a stream and, potentially, instability. Thomas looks briefly at this before moving on to HEVC.

At the time of this talk, HEVC was still new and much has happened to it since. This part of the talk gives a good introduction to the reasons that HEVC was brought into being and serves as an interesting comparison for the reasons that VVC, AV1, EVC and other codecs today are needed.

For the latest on DASH, check out the videos in the list of related posts below.

Watch now!
Speaker

Thomas Kernen Thomas Kernen
Staff Staff Architect, NVIDIA
Co-Chair SMPTE 32M Technology Committee, SMPTE
Formerly Technical Leader, Cisco,

Video: Scaling Live OTT with DASH

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


MPEG DASH is a standard for streaming which provides a stable, open chain for distribution detailing aspects like packaging and DRM as well as being the basis for low-latency CMAF streaming.

DASH Manifest files, text files which list the many small files which make up the stream, can be complicated, long and take a long time to parse, demonstrates Hulu’s Zachary Cava. As the live event continues, the number of chunks to describe increases and so manifest files can easily grow to hundred of KB and eventually to megabytes meaning the standard way of producing these .mpd files will end up slowing the player down to the point it can’t keep up with the stream.

Zachary goes over some initial optimisations which help a lot in reducing the size o the manifests before introducing a method of solving the scalability issue. He explains that patching the mid file is the way to go meaning you can reference just the updated values in the latest .mpd.

With on-secreen examples of manifest files, we clearly see how this works and we see that this method is still compatible with branching of the playback e.g. for regionalisation of advertising or programming.

Zachary finishes by explaining that this technique is arriving in the 4th edition of MPEG-DASH and by answering questions from the audience.

Watch now!

Speaker

Zachary Cava Zachary Cava
Video Platform Architect.
Hulu

Video: Introducing Low-Latency HLS

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

HLS has taken the world by storm since its first release 10 years ago. Capitalising on the already widely understood and deployed technologies already underpinning websites at the time, it brought with it great scalability and the ability to seamlessly move between different bitrate streams to help deal with varying network performance (and computer performance!)

HLS has continued to evolve over the years with the new versions being documented as RFC drafts under the IETF. Its biggest problem for today’s market is its latency. As originally specified, you were guaranteed at least 30 seconds latency and many viewers would see a minute. This has improved over the years, but only so far.

Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS) is Apple’s answer to the latency problem. A way of bringing down latency to be comparable with broadcast television for those live broadcast where immediacy really matters.

Please note: Since this video was recorded, Apple has released a new draft of LL-HLS. As described in this great article from Mux, the update’s changes are

  • “Delivering shorter sub-segments of the video stream (Apple call these parts) more frequently (every 0.3 – 0.5s)
  • Using HTTP/2 PUSH to deliver these smaller parts, pushed in response to a blocking playlist request
  • Blocking playlist requests, eliminating the current speculative manifest request polling behaviour in HLS
  • Smaller, delta rendition playlists, which reduces playlist size, which is important since playlists are requested more frequently
  • Faster rendition switching, enabled by rendition reports, which allows clients to see what is happening in another playlist without requesting it in its entirety”[0]

Read the full article for the details and implications, some of which address some points made in the talk.

Furthermore, THEOplayer have released this talk explaining the changes and discussing implementation.

This talk from Apple’s HLS Technical Lead, Roger Pantos, given at Apple’s WWDC conference this year goes through the problems and the solution, clearly describing LL-HLS. Over the following weeks here on The Broadcast Knowledge we will follow up with some more talks discussing real-world implementations of LL-HLS, but to understand them, we really need to understand the fundamental proposition.

Apple has always been the gatekeeper to HLS and this is one reason the MPEG DASH exists; a streaming standard that is separate to any one corporation and has the benefits of being passed by a standards body (MPEG). So who better to give the initial introduction.

HLS is a chunk-based streaming protocol meaning that the illusion of a perfect stream of data is given by downloading in quick succession many different files and it’s the need to have a pipeline of these files which causes much of the delay, both in creating them and in stacking them up for playback. LL-HLS uses techniques such as reducing chunk length and moving only parts of them in order to drastically reduce this intrinsic latency.

Another requirement of LL-HLS is HTTP/2 which is an advance on HTTP bringing with it benefits such as having multiple requests over a single HTTP connect thereby reducing overheads and request pipelining.

Roger carefully paints the whole picture and shows how this is intended to work. So while the industry is still in the midst of implementing this protocol, take some time to understand it from the source – from Apple.

Watch now!
Download the presentation

Speaker

Roger Pantos Roger Pantos
HLS Technical Lead,
Apple

Webinar: AWS – Behind the Stream

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Date: November 14, 2019 / 8am PST / 11am EST / 16:00 GMT

Behind The Stream is an online show containing three webinars designed for sports media broadcasters, athletic teams, and digital rights holders.

The first of the three sessions here covers creating the right experience for the service. Particularly in sports, there are different ways to present graphics and stats, to have interactivity and to innovate in order to keep the audience with you and interested.

The second session is an intriguing look into using machine learning to analyse the video to create metadata, including player tracking and then how to process and display that data to add an extra layer of interest for the audience.

Lastly, but the longest session of the three, is an hour spent whiteboarding the streaming system itself, how the different elements in the cloud work together and the things to look out for when implementing this for yourself.

Whilst these sessions are specifically about AWS services, much of the principles can be carried over to other cloud providers. With this factor and AWS being synonymous, for many, with ‘cloud’, learning the AWS way of doing things is a fantastic way to learn about operating in the cloud in general.

Register now!