New HLS Features: Alternate Source, New Audio Codecs, Byte-Range Support, & I-Frame Playlists

While everyone else was eating Christmas dinner, our dev team was hard at work. We kicked off the new year by bolstering our industry-leading HLS Pro feature set with some new capabilities. Let's take a closer look at these.

Main & Alternative Sources

With this feature customers can now designate both a primate and secondary video source. In the manifest file you can specify which version should be delivered. This way the client only needs to download one version of the source content. This is useful in situations where alternate camera angles are available. In addition, this applies to audio sources. In the case of audio sources, this is useful when there are audio tracks in multiple language.

AC-3 Audio Codec

In addition to the HE-AACv2 audio codec from Dolby, we now support the use of the AC-3 codec. This codec is important for broader compatibility, especially with Android. In addition, AC-3 support features such as surround sound. This codec is also important when delivering audio in an HLS stream to OTT devices such as AppleTV or the Xbox.

Byte-Range Support

With byte-range support larger media segments can be specified. If needed you can specify larger size media segments or even one large media segment. This allows the provider to store less files on their server. In turn, this provides better performance for proxy caching servers. Byte-Range is support in not only iOS device but also popular players like JWplayer.

I-Frame Playlist

I-Frame Playlists or Intra-Frames are encoded video frames that don't require the presence of other video frames. An I-Frame Playlist is a playlist made up solely of these Intra-Frames. While these playlists are pretty similar to a standard playlist, there is one key difference. They do not have a set duration and instead are simply capturing a specific moment in playback. This feature has been implemented to support trick-play' or the ability to view playback while fast forwarding. PBS used these HLS controls to leverage trick-play for their viewers.

Are you using of these advanced HLS features in your media workflow? Let us know in the comments.

LINK:	http://www.encoding.com/blog/2015/01/23/new-hls-features-alternate-sou...
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