Video Breakthroughs

The Hippo Media Server is a simple, standalone HTTP server designed to simplify the delivery of MPEG DASH and Smooth Streaming media. MPEG DASH and Smooth Streaming are both protocols for HTTP-based adaptive streaming. With adaptive Streaming, a media presentation is served to streaming clients as a sequence of small media segments (each segment containing typically 2 to 10 seconds of audio or video). Each segment is accessed over HTTP with an individual URL. In order to serve an adaptive streaming presentation with a regular HTTP server like Apache, Nginx or other populare HTTP servers, one needs to split the original media files into small individual files, one for each segment, so that they can be accessed through separate URLs. This can be very difficult to manage. The Hippo Media Server implements a simple URL virtualization scheme: instead of mapping each URL to a file in the server's filesystem, each URL consists of a pattern, which is parsed by the server when it handles a request, and from which it can locate the appropriate portion of a file in the filesystem. This way, a single media file containing the media data for the segments can be represented as discrete URLs.

Usually when creating a video, all that is needed is to encode it using a codec (for example H.264 or HEVC). However, to transmit a video using MPEG-DASH, an extra segmentation step is required. Typical encoders do not provide this step and produce content which is not compatible with DASH.

Our dash.encrypt project provides a solution. It takes encoded video and audio from an array of different formats and repackages them as valid DASH streams. It also generates the required manifest which is the table of contents for the stream.

Hosted as a GitHub project, it is available as an open-source application written in Java. We provide everything you need to start creating DASH content and invite you to help refine the program.

A heavyweight panel that included Google, Microsoft Open Technologies, and Digital Primates guided Streaming Media West attendees through the creation of an open source DASH-AVC/264 player. Will Law, chief architect for Akamai, moderated and kicked off the discussion.

"We're trying to cook up something delicious here, and we have three ingredients to do it. We've got MPEG-DASH, we've got MSE/EME, and we've got dash.js," Law began. "You may not know what these are. I'm going to describe very briefly what our core ingredients are, and then we'll see how they're mixed by our panelists."

Mozilla has recently added basic support of DASH to their famous web browser Firefox. The code was initially based on libdash.