[vlc-devel] MPEG-DASH and the likes

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 22:59:40 +0200, Frédéric Yhuel <yhuelf at gmail.com>
wrote:
> It has been some time (more than a year) since someone did a
> meaningful patch on MPEG-DASH client module.

What can I say... I did raise this potential problem when the huge patch
series came in, and was told that it was going to be maintained. Whether it
has no bugs, or is in fact unmaintained, I honestly cannot say. But this is
unfortunately but unsurprisingly very typical of graduate projects.

> Smooth Streaming module did not receive any contribution besides the
> two small fixes of Rémi Durrafort last January. It doesn't seem to
> work any more (I've no idea why yet).

Say, *you* wrote it...

> Only HLS seems to be of some interest to the world, at least enough to
> motivate some developers to work on it.

> I was thinking to set aside some time to work again on Smooth
> Streaming module: first to debug it, then to finish the move from
> stream_filter to demux, or even a complete rewrite as a "single" demux
> (as opposed to a chained demux).

The VLC core is almost ready to support threaded demuxers. There is still
some problem with SET_PAUSE though.

> But before I do, I'd like to know if it is worthwhile doing so. Smooth
> Streaming doesn't seem to be used much in a DRM-free context, but
> maybe I'm wrong. And what do you think of MPEG-DASH? Is it going to
> take off? Is there a point for VLC users?

I think most HTTP-delivered contents come through Flash, and will
progressively shift to HTML5. HLS may be winning over DASH, Smooth and
plain old raw HTTP. But in the big picture, this might be but a pyrrhic
victory.

Anyway, you should steer your work based on you, your boss, your clients
or your customers, not the VLC freeloaders^Wusers.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Sent from my collocated server