Video: How Libre Can you Go?


Many companies would love to be using free codecs, unencumbered by patents, rather than paying for HEVC or AVC. Phil Cluff shows that, contrary to popular belief, it is possible stream with free codecs and get good coverage on mobile and desktop.

Phil starts off by looking at the codecs available and whether they’re patent encumbered with an eye to how much of the market can actually decode them. Free codecs and containers like WebM, VP8 etc. are not supported by Safari which reduces mobile penetration by half. To prove the point, Phil presents the results of his trials in using HEVC, AVC and VP8 on all major browsers.

Whilst this initially leaves a disappointing result for streaming with libre codecs on mobile, there is a solution! Phil explains how an idea from several years ago is being reworked to provide a free streaming protocol MPAG-SASH which avoids using DASH which is itself based on ISO BMFF which is patent encumbered. He then explains how open video players like video.js can be modified to decode libre codecs.

With these two enhancements, we finally see that coverage of up to 80% on mobile is, in principle, possible.

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Speakers

Phil Cuff Phil Cluff
Streaming Specialist,
Mux

Video: What’s the Deal with LL-HLS?

Low latency streaming was moving forward without Apple’s help – but they’ve published their specification now, so what does that mean for the community efforts that were already underway and, in some places, in use?

Apple is responsible for HLS, the most prevalent protocol for streaming video online today. In itself, it’s a great success story as HLS was ideal for its time. It relied on HTTP which was a tried and trusted technology of the day, but the fact it was file-based instead of a stream pushed from the origin was a key factor in its wide adoption.

As life has moved on and demands have moved from “I’d love to see some video – any video – on the internet!” to “Why is my HD stream arriving after my flat mate’s TV’s?” we see that HLS isn’t quite up to the task of low-latency delivery. Using pure HLS as originally specified, a latency of less than 20 seconds was an achievement.

Various methods were, therefore, employed to improve HLS. These ideas included cutting the duration of each piece of the video, introducing HTTP 1.1’s Chunked Transfer Encoding, early announcement of chunks and many others. Using these, and other, techniques, Low Latency HLS (LHLS) was able to deliver streams of 9 down to 4 seconds.

Come WWDC this year, Apple announced their specification on achieving low latency streaming which the community is calling ALHLS (Apple Low-latency HLS). There are notable differences in Apple’s approach to that already adopted by the community at large. Given the estimated 1.4 billion active iOS devices and the fact that Apple will use adherence to this specification to certify apps as ‘low latency’, this is something that the community can’t ignore.

Zac Shenker from Comcast explains some of this backstory and helps us unravel what this means for us all. Zac first explains what LHS is and then goes into detail on Apple’s version which includes interesting, mandatory, elements like using HTTP/2. Using HTTP/2 and the newer QUIC (which will become effectively HTTP/3) is very tempting for streaming applications but it requires work both on the server and the player side. Recent tests using QUIC have been, when taken as a whole, inconclusive in terms of working out whether this it has a positive or a negative impact on streaming performance; experiments have shown both results.

The talk is a detailed look at the large array of requirements in this specification. The conclusion is a general surprise at the amount of ‘moving parts’ given there is both significant work to be done on the server as well as the player. The server will have to remember state and due to the use of HTTP/2, it’s not clear that the very small playlist.m3u8 files can be served from a playlist-optimised CDN separately from the video as is often the case today.

There’s a whole heap of difference between serving a flood of large files and delivering a small, though continually updated, file to thousands of endpoints. As such, CDNs currently optimised separately for the text playlists and the media files they serve. They may even be delivered by totally separate infrastructures.

Zac explains why this changes with LL-HLS both in terms of separation but also in the frequency of updating the playlist files. He goes on to explore the other open questions like how easy it will be to integrate Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) and even the appetite for adoption of HTTP/2.

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Speaker

Zac Shenker Zac Shenker
Director of Engineering, Video Experience & Optimization,
CBS Interactive

Video: Understanding Video Performance: QoE is not QoS

Mux’s Justin Sanford explains the difference between Quality of Service and Quality of Experience; the latter being about the entire viewer experience. Justin looks at ‘Startup time’ showing that it’s a combination of an number of factors which can include loading a web page showing the dependence of your player on the whole ecosystem.

Justin discusses rebuffering and what ‘quality’ is when we talk about streaming. Quality is a combination of encoding quality, resolution but also whether the playback judders.

“Not every optimisation is a tradeoff, however startup time vs. rebuffering is a canonical tradeoff.”

Justin Sanford, Mux

Finally we look at ways of dealing with this, including gathering analytics, standards for measuring quality of experience, and understanding the types of issues your viewers care most about.

From San Francisco Video Tech.

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Speaker

Justin Sanford Justin Sanford
Product Manager,
Mux

Video: AAC Demystified: How the AAC audio codec works and how to make sense of all its crazy profiles.

The title says it all! Alex Converse speaks here at the San Fancisco Video Tech meet up while he was working at Google discussing the ins and outs of AAC – and since he implemented an AAC decoder himself, he should know a thing or two about it.

Sure enough, Alex delivers by talking about the different version of AAA that have been around since MPEG 2 AAC through to the high efficiency AACs we have seen more recently.

Walking through the AAC Encoder block diagram we look at each of the different sections from sampling, MDCT (a type of Fourier transform) to psychoacoustic processing, stereo processing and more.

We then start to look at the syntax for the way the streams are structured which brings us in to understanding the AAC channel modes, and the enhanced mechanisms for encoding and processing used by the later versions of AAC including HE-AAC V2.

Alex finished with quick look at low delay codecs and a Q&A.

A great, detailed, overview of AAC. Ideal for developers and those who need to fully understand audio.

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Speaker

Alex Converse Alex Converse
Senior Software Engineer,
Twitch