Jim Lesurf wrote:
People may be interested in this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/po...0#dna-comments
MPEG-DASH, I see. I get that it's an advance in technology, gives better
load balance on the servers, is less likely to cause dropouts, and handles
forward and backward jumps well. Of course, it does mean that you need the
latest software to play it, but if you've got some media playing device
that's not going to get another firmware update then hard luck.
The first I knew about DASH was when I was looking a physics lecture in a
series that I'd been following via my TV's Youtube player and noticed that
I could no longer clearly see what the lecturer was writing on the board. I
then tried the Youtube-plugin for the Raspberry-Pi's "Raspbmc" media-player
and found exactly the same problem. A bit of research informed me that
Youtube were now supplying the 480p-resolution videos in DASH format only,
and anything that couldn't handle DASH would drop down to 360p which was
still supplied in the old MPEG format. (Likewise 1080p videos would drop
to 720p.) This forced me to find out how to download Youtube DASH videos
so that I could convert them to a format that I could use, even though I
would prefer to stream them. Luckily it only involves downloading the
separate audio and video streams and stitching them together, but not fully
recoding them. This guy explains how:
http://youtu.be/G7uztVbg7CQ