Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/adobe-throws-in-towel-adopts-http-live-streaming-for-ios.ars

by evo_9 • 15 years ago

64 23 15 years ago

andymoe2• 15 years ago

Good. I would expect, and hope for, support for http streaming on Amazons CloudFront service soon since they use Adobe's media server already. [1] This would be really helpfully for some indie iOS developers.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

huxley• 15 years ago

Not sure if it is a factor but Wowza has supported HTTP Live Streaming for a while, maybe they've been eating at a bit of Flash Media Server's market share.

andymoe2• 15 years ago

Speaking of streaming servers, does anyone have experience with erlyvideo in production?

http://erlyvideo.org

I have it up and running on my mac - the web UI could use some love though.

Terretta3• 15 years ago

Finally! RTMP is an abomination. Now let's get Apple HTTP Adaptive Bitrate Streaming and SSTP into Flash Player too.

Biased feature comparison: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/792/adaptive-streaming-compar...

geraldalewis• 15 years ago

Why do you say RTMP is an abomination? (I feel like the comparison chart you linked to didn't make so strong a case -- are you speaking from experience with the technologies?)

Terretta3• 15 years ago

I've built two video streaming CDNs over past 14 years, certified by both techs:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2000/Feb00/DigitalB...

http://www.wowzamedia.com/partners.html

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/servic...

RTMP is missing basic features for modern scalable distributed video delivery (video from more than one server), which is odd since it was actually late to the game.

Meanwhile, these newer HTTP streaming (not talking about progressive download or pseudo streaming) protocols let you leverage much more widely adopted and understood delivery platforms.

DarkShikari2• 15 years ago

Regardless of how much of an "abomination" RTMP is, Apple's system is a huge hack:

1. It's taking a transport stream format based around a buffering model... but as far as I can tell, completely ignoring the actual buffering model itself. Instead of working within the MPEG buffering model, it simply makes some arbitrary restrictions on the size of each chunk, which doesn't make any sense.

2. Aggravated by 1), the latency of the system is horrible. Good luck using "HTTP live streaming" for anything that needs less than 5 seconds of latency, let alone 0.05 seconds.

I can implement a videoconferencing system in RTMP. I sure as heck can't do it with "HTTP live streaming".

Now, does it work well for some use-cases? Sure, but it's definitely not a replacement for all aspects of RTMP.

(Also, obviously as you mentioned the link is biased, but it's actually not even relevant to your post: it's comparing Adobe's software to Microsoft's software, not comparing protocols. Talking about Adobe's software is very silly when nearly everyone actually uses Red5, Wowza, etc. For example, it mentions that the latency is ~6 seconds, but the company I work for has that down to ~100 times less.)

Terretta3• 15 years ago

Absolutely love your work, btw.

Not a huge fan of HLS for our customers even with libraries of tens of thousands of full length movies serving to iOS. Latency is the number one complaint. Meanwhile, to your point, we churn out video broadcasting sites for clients on RTMP.

EDIT:(We support server side PPM on RTSP, RTMP, and both Apple and Microsoft adaptive HTTP, from WMS, IIS Media Services, Wowza, DSS, and FMS. This makes us pretty familiar with the buffering approaches, and agree with you, Apple's is essentially broken. That said, the value of being able to leverage a more "commodity" HTTP infrastructure is huge.)

Been meaning to talk to you some time about x264 in the near real time mode. Drop me contact info to my user name at gmail?

PS. We use both Red5 and Wowza, but usually Wowza for these kinds of projects, which we have deployed CDN-wide.

kierank• 15 years ago

Yes, it totally ignores the MPEG buffering model. Perfectly valid streams don't play on Apple devices.

MikeW• 15 years ago

As far as I can tell, there are no Open Source streaming servers that support (realtime) HTTP Live Streaming. I think this is a massive shame and I would LOVE to see one.

So I think it makes great sense for Adobe to add support for this as there are so few HTTP Live Streaming solutions out there right now.

wazoox• 15 years ago

VLC apparently streams on http. Is it the same thing? http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo_New

beagle3• 15 years ago

erlyvideo does HTTP Live Streaming "internally"

segmenter (various open source variations floating around googlecode, github and other places) does too, by creating the files and letting you stream them out with your own web server (Apache, nginx, ....)

There's enough support for it to be useful.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

I'm building a video post-production workflow system for a client in Hollywood currently so this kind of news is very welcomed. Anything that makes it easier to stream and/or gives me more choices and less compatibility issues is great.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

Forget FMS, check out Wowza.

Fester• 15 years ago

I hope that IETF will be safe enough to not accept 'live streaming' as a standart. Streaming must be streamed, not mocked by winamp'ish playlists.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

What is the advantage to using FMS over Wowza Media Server?

Wowza licensing appears more reasonable and flexible.

atlbeer• 15 years ago

Can we finally get HLS support for Windows now?

Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS

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