[foms] To DASH or not to DASH

[Jeroen Wijering]

Hey,

Speaking for myself, I do think DASH (the XML format) could be pretty useful. It's fairly extensive and can indeed be used as a manifest format for WebM (A/V) + (Web)SRT (captions). We built some basic support for it in JW Player (using H64/AAC though). Hopefully there'll be an "official" baseline version of the format, since a full XML (with all the groupings and namespaces) is pretty overwhelming. It does provide several useful options that M3U8 does not (separate audio/video tracks, single source with ranges, dvr windows). 

DRM is harder. Perhaps there's a way to provision but not implement it? At the other hand, one needs quite a few low-level API's if decryption is not managed by the browser. To date we stayed away from implementing DRM in the JW Players, since it's a lot of work for a few clients (big companies generally build their own players). Isn't there a more or less common decryption algothytm used by all systems, and couldn't this be applied in browsers/players if a decryption key was provided over an API? 

Perhaps somebody knows a good read-up on the various DRM systems that are available at present? In the wild, I only seem to encounter Microsoft's PlayReady. 

Kind regards,

Jeroen




On Jan 3, 2011, at 5:59 AM, Pierre-Yves KEREMBELLEC wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Reading this blogpost: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/html5-and-video-streaming.html, I wondered what
> was the FOMS list members position on DASH (esp. browsers vendors)? Is this something that anyone would
> be willing to implement? What about DRM: how could it be rolled-out in open-source software?
> 
> Happy new year to everyone on the list,
> Pierre-Yves
> 
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