[foms] Proposal: adaptive streaming using open codecs

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:52:10 +0200, Christopher Blizzard  
<blizzard at mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 10/20/2010 11:46 AM, Jeroen Wijering wrote:
>> On Oct 20, 2010, at 8:45 PM, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/20/2010 5:24 AM, Jeroen Wijering wrote:
>>>> Again, the proposal from Christopher on providing a "Manifest API"  
>>>> (basically a playlist of chunks) plus having some QOS metrics  
>>>> (bandwidth, framedrops) would already allow developers to build  
>>>> adaptive streaming on the javascript level. Far easier for a first  
>>>> implementation. I guess we swiftly need a proposal for the "Manifest  
>>>> API".
>>> Note that one of Philip's suggestion's (maybe not on the list? I can't  
>>> remember.) was that we do the API before we do the manifest work.   
>>> This would allow us to iterate, test and figure out what worked before  
>>> figuring out what we needed in the manifest.
>> Yes, that was Philip's proposal as well. Makes a lot of sense.
>>
>> - Jeroen
>
> Also would allow us to test out switching algorithms that we might want
> to include in browsers by default.  And (*gasp*!) specify them.
>
> --Chris

I support this message :)

In some way or another, we need to achieve gapless playback. These are the  
options I know of so far:

1. A concatenation API (maybe Stream) to form a single stream from  
multiple URLs. This would basically be a byte concatentation API, and  
assumes that we either have the chunks be plain slices or that we support  
chained Ogg/WebM gaplessly. It has some similarity to a Manifest API in  
that it lists several URLs. The difference may be that the video element  
isn't aware of the multiple resources, that's all hidden in the URL,  
effectively made part of the network layer of the browser.

2. Have each chunk in its own <video> and add a synchronization API. The  
main use case for this is synchronizing external audio tracks, but as a  
side-effect one could allow synchronizing two clips at their edges. My  
assumption is that we will want such a sync API eventually anyway.  
However, it's not a terribly obvious way of thinking about gapless  
playback. Also, it would require switching the video elements at the exact  
right time, and <track> elements would have to be duplicated...

Does anyone have opinions on either of these approaches? Are there others?

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software