Understanding DASH264 and Building a Client
How is MPEG-DASH different from DASH264? At the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, Jeff Tapper of Digital Primates explained the differences, as well as how to create a DASH264 player.
"What's interesting about DASH264 is it provides all the basic functionality that you're going to need," Tapper said. "It's going to still handle the advanced use cases, but it focuses on a single codec. Right now, the vast majority of video on the web is in H.264, so rather than dealing with a spec that can handle anything for anyone at anytime, we have a specification about how do we handle it specifically within H.264."
So rather that being a generalist, DASH264 excels an one particular purpose. That makes implementing it easier.
"While a manifest allows for millions of different variations on how things might be described, DASH264 suggests 'here's some very specific things that we can do,' and it helps to narrow down what the DASH world can look like and helps create much better interoperability across all the people and the players," Tapper said. "From the encoders to the DRM to the CDNs to the client-side, there's a number of different players that get involved, and trying to work out interop when you have a spec that can allow for virtually anything is not simple."
To hear more about DASH and learn how to create a DASH264 player, watch the video below and download Tapper's presentation.
How-To: Building a DASH264 Client
With all the device fragmentation in the market, it is getting increasingly difficult to provide content to all of them equally. The MPEG-DASH specification promises to unify the field and provide a ubiquitous format that can be used by most devices. This technical session explores how to build a DASH264 player. We will explore a few different players, including one built-in JavaScript using the MediaSource APIs to run natively in some browsers, and another using OSMF and ActionScript that can run in any browser with a Flash player.
Speaker: Jeff Tapper, Senior Consultant, Digital Primates
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