Why the Broadcasting Industry Should Get Behind DASH Adoption
How is DASH different from competing video standards. It's open, and for broadcasters that's a big factor. At the recent Streaming Media East conference, Jeff Tapper, chief architect at Digital Primates, taught attendees how to build a DASH player, and also why DASH stands apart.
"The real key differentiator of DASH, as opposed to any of the other HTTP streaming formats, is it's an open standard. HLS, HDS, Smooth Streaming: They're all owned by one company," Tapper said. "Some of them have become de facto standards on their own, but the more I work with broadcasters and people who are used to open standards like AM and FM and UHF and VHF -- these are standards that everybody agrees on. The broadcasting world loves standards."
Not only is DASH open, it's also open to any video codec.
"Most of the other standards I've talked about were built with H.264 in mind. It was the de facto standard at the time, and so they're build around that," Tapper explained. "DASH was built to be codec-agnostic. DASH doesn't care what the content is. Really, all DASH is is a way of segmenting your MP4 files and describing where to find those segments. Those MP4 files, whether you've encoded them with H.264 or H.265, VP6, VP8, VP9, it doesn't matter."
To learn how to build a DASH video player, watch the video below and download Tapper's presentation.
How To: Building a DASH Video Player
As the MPEG-DASH standard grows in popularity, a common question is “Where are the players to consume DASH content?” In this session, we will explore how to consume DASH content, including parsing the manifest, retrieving the segments, choosing appropriate bitrates, and playing back the content. This session will focus on playback natively in a browser without plugins, but is also applicable to Flash, Android, and iOS developers.
Speaker: Jeff Tapper, Chief Architect, Digital Primates
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