[foms] HLS and HLS patents

[Andoni Morales]

2010/10/15 Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at mozilla.com>:
>  On 10/15/2010 1:23 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> They have also pointed me to the MPEG effort in the space, which is
>> supposedly media file format independent. There is no public spec
>> available at this stage and it is unclear what the rights situation
>> will be. But I was told it builds on the 3GPP spec in this space. That
>> is available at
>> http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/26_series/26.234/26234-940.zip .
>> The file format is called "MPD" for Media Presentation Description and
>> below is an example. I am rather un-excited by its complexity in
>> comparison to m3u8 actually:
>
> It's also worth looking at the stuff from Microsoft as well.  In fact,
> there's a chance (without having talked to them) that they might want to
> standardize something that's similar to how Smooth Streaming works, at
> least on the client.  It will be good to have a partner here, be it
> Apple or Microsoft.

For live, Microsoft's solution is lighter than Apple's one.

Apple's playlists are updated each fragment duration, which means two
request for fetching a fragment: one to update the playlist and a
second one for the new fragment. Instead, using Microsoft's manifests,
the client downloads the manifest once and it builds the playlist
on-the-fly using the information stored in the uuid box, which has a
lookahead for two fragments[1]

Apple's playlist are much easier to generate and it's easier to handle
discontinuities  or doing load balancing, but building the playlist
on-the-fly like Microsoft does might reduce considerably the number of
request to the server.

Andoni

[1]http://forums.iis.net/t/1167897.aspx
>
> --Chris
> _______________________________________________
> foms mailing list
> foms at lists.annodex.net
> http://lists.annodex.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/foms
>



-- 
Andoni Morales Alastruey

LongoMatch:The Digital Coach
http://www.longomatch.ylatuya.es