Category: Television Systems

Google’s contradictions are killing CMAF and screwing everyone , including its own users

OTT / Video encoding

Or why you won’t get 4K quality on Netflix content using Chrome anytime soon. I’ve tracked CMAF development before [1], and how the whole industry went through so much effort into creating a common format which would be compatible with every single device out there. Yes, manifests would be different between HLS and DASH, but the underlying streamed content would be shared between all devices. In order for people to understand how we got that far, we need to understand that it took Microsoft’s willingness to allow applications and devices using Playready 3 or below to become incompatible with content encrypted using Playready …

DRM 101 – Introduction to DRM systems

DRM / OTT / Television SystemsLeave a comment

It may seem silly, but it’s so difficult to find proper information about a DRM is, what it isn’t, and broadly, how it works. What is not a DRM Most people associate a DRM with content protection, a way to protect the content. However, stricto sensu, it isn’t. A DRM system is not about how contents are protected or encrypted. In fact, most current DRMs use exactly the same encryption methods to protect content, and again contrary to most DRM way of thinking, these methods are public and vary between AES-CTR and AES-CBC. If you find those names too familiar, it’s …

Playready 4 will bring closure to the DASH dream: one single OTT format to rule them all

OTT / Video encodingLeave a comment

Editor’s note: the initial version mistakenly identified AES-CTR as “AES-CTB”, which doesn’t really exist. What got us here? 2017 was a weird year. It’s not often that the OTT video industry comes together to create simplify the industry player’s lives. It was tried before and failed. Then DASH appeared, it promised to rule on the OTT format wars, by proposing a single standard format, but at the end of the day, it failed to deliver its promise. DASH is a single standard, but as any other bad standard, it allows for options, incompatible options. It’s these options which allows standard compliant …

Introduction to Multicast ABR (M-ABR) – Where it works and where it totally fails

Media / Television Systems / Video encodingLeave a comment

Last year (2016), Cablelabs published a very interesting document entitled “IP Multicast Adaptive Bit Rate Architecture Technical Report“, describing how to bring together two fundamental and previously incompatible network concepts: Multicast and Adaptive Bitrate delivery, in what it call Multicast ABR (M-ABR). But, does it make sense? If it does, on which use cases it works? Let me spoil the surprise: It does make sense on one single use case. It spectacularly fails elsewhere. To start with, lets have a look at the generic M-ABR architecture:

HDMI 2.0 is finally here, but may not be what you were expecting

Consumer Electronic Devices / HDMIOne Comment

Back in September 4th 2013, HDMI Forum released the new version of HDMI, which was upgraded to version 2.0. This new version brought some very necessary upgrades in terms of supported bandwidth and the much needed new 4K resolutions. Also, as an added bonus, existing 1.4 category 2 cables would be compatible with the new standard and resolutions. On the other hand, people learned to put some salt on some technological breakthroughs and product launches, with some call vapourware or paperware. Anyways, HDMI 2.0 would have no reason to diverge from the rest of the industry best practices, and as such it brings some much needed …

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