"HTTP Live Streaming" with Quicktime X Not For the Average Joe
Producers like me who are interested in distributing video content over the Web and to the iPhone were quite interested in Apple's announcement that "Quicktime X" (which was released just yesterday) contained a feature called "HTTP Live Streaming."
This is how Apple describes it:
"HTTP live streaming is designed for mobility and can dynamically adjust movie playback quality to match the available speed of wired or wireless networks, perfect whether the video is watched on a computer or on a mobile device like iPhone or iPod touch."
What they don't quite explain actually leaves out a lot.
First of all, this is really all about streaming videos to an iPhone running the latest 3.0 software - it's not really about delivering video to a Web browser on someone's desktop computer, at least not yet according to their documentation.
The promise of this technology is actually very interesting. It means that an ordinary Web server from which either live or pre-recorded video is streamed will be capable of monitoring the available bandwidth of the person watching the video on their iPhone. If the person moves from an environment where they had only a slow connection to the Internet to a location where now they have great Internet connectivity, the Web server will notice this and send them a higher quality video stream. It also works in reverse so that the Web server can switch "mid stream" to a lower quality video, if needed.
Sounds very cool, right? But where's the information on how to make this actually work?
Well, it turns out that it's relatively hidden in an area normally visited only by programmers registered with Apple who create iPhone applications.
Also, even though Apple touts that this can be done using an ordinary Web server what they don't promote is that you will need specialized hardware or software (like "media encoders" and "stream segmenters") and be able to program to create the .m3u8 and .ts files that this technique is built upon. And the video itself has to be in the proper format - an MPEG-2 transport stream creating videos in the H.264 Baseline Level 3.0 format. Sounds expensive and complicated doesn't it?
In other words, unless you are a programmer and have some money to purchase this stuff, right now you basically have to wait for a company to develop this into a real product that the average Joe video producer can use and understand.
Right now Apple's "HTTP Live Streaming" it is just a newly proposed Internet protocol - not an actual product.
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Reader Comments (3)
It looks like http://seamlessinteractive.com/ makes an encoder for live iPhone streams.
[...] more than a year later, the standard is effectively proprietary. It’s been criticized for being more complicated to implement than advertised. And Microsoft has not said anything about [...]
[...] more than a year later, the standard is effectively proprietary. It’s been criticized for being more complicated to implement than advertised. And Microsoft has not said anything about [...]