How to Encode for Apple iOS Devices

At the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, video expert Jan Ozer led a how-to presentation on encoding for Apple iOS devices. The H.264 codec is crucial for iOS support, and Ozer explained why:

"H.264 is important because it's the only codec that plays on iOS devices. You need to know a little about how H.264 works in order to configure your video appropriately," Ozer began.

This codec has a lot of support behind it, so it's probably going to be around for a while.

"H.264: what's significant about the codec is it's the only codec that was jointly implemented by two standards bodies. So we see the ITU on the left ," Ozer said referring to his presentation, "that's the International Telecommunications Union, they're in charge of telephone, radio, and TV -- and ISO is the MPEG group; they're in charge of photography, computer, and consumer electronics. What this translates to is a lot of cheap hardware support. You've got a lot of consumer electronics devices, a lot of cameras, a lot of computers using this, so it's either supported very effectively in software or supported via inexpensive H.264 encoding and decoding chips. That presents a pretty big barrier of entry to new codecs coming into the market."

That widespread adoption, in other words, will keep other codecs out of the market.

"When you see a new codec like WebM come out, the thing you think about is 'Well, WebM is nice, Google is a really big company,' but H.264 has all the support from all these hardware companies who really don't care about WebM, don't care about the internet," added Ozer.

For much more on preparing video for iOS devices, watch the video below and download Ozer's presentation.

Encoding Video for iOS Devices

This seminar starts by detailing the playback specs for all iOS devices, old and new. Then, learn the strategies used by prominent iTunes publishers to serve the complete range of installed iOS devices. Next, the seminar switches to cellular wireless delivery, with a technical description of Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), including recommendations for the number of streams and Apple's encoding parameters. The seminar concludes with a review of encoding options for HLS and techniques for serving multiple target platforms such as Flash and iOS devices with a single set of encoded H.264 files.

Speaker: Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing

How to Encode and Deliver to Multiple ABR Formats

Use a single adaptive group, packaged differently for different targets, to keep encoding and storage costs down.

06 Apr 2016