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

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 …

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

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

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:

iPhone 6s video decoding capabilities – Sometimes Apple underrates it’s products

Although I’ve been an Apple heavy user for a number of years now, it always bugs me when companies misrepresent their products, event if the misrepresentation is a underrating of the actual product. For me, specifications must be as accurate as possible, no matter if it comes from Apple, and understating it’s video decoding capabilities it not on my list of expected weird things, but it does seem to happen.

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