The benefits of DASH
There exist multiple standards for adaptive streaming over HTTP, the most popular of which are HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), SmoothStreaming and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Whilst HLS is the most widely used of these three standards today, it’s important to note that it has major disadvantages compared to both DASH and SmoothStreaming. Here we touch on just two of them.
- HLS requires that video is packaged in the M2TS transport stream; a format that was designed for broadcast TV rather than for streaming content over the internet. Conversely, both DASH and SmoothStreaming use the fragmented MP4 (fMP4) container format, which was designed specifically with streaming content over the internet in mind. M2TS has many inherent disadvantages compared to fMP4, both for servers and clients, some of which are summarized by Timothy Siglin’s excellent white paper.
- All three standards divide media into small chunks, and allow clients to switch between different qualities (typically based on the available bandwidth) by having them stop downloading chunks of one quality and start downloading chunks of another. DASH and SmoothStreaming with fMP4 both require that chunk boundaries are aligned across the different qualities, and that each chunk starts with a keyframe. This allows seamless switching from one quality to another without ever having to download overlapping chunks in multiple qualities. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for HLS. HLS does not require that chunks start with keyframes, and so to seamlessly switch from one quality to another requires (in the worst case) that the client download overlapping chunks in both the old and new quality, and then splice them together when a keyframe is found. This is inefficient and significantly increases the probability of re-buffers, particularly when the client is attempting to switch to a lower quality due to a decrease in the available bandwidth.
DASH is the only internationally standardized solution, and an increasing number of major streaming services have either adopted it or are in the process of doing so. With this and the advantages outlined above in mind, we’ve decided to prioritize DASH support in ExoPlayer. This means that whilst we’ll continue to support both SmoothStreaming and HLS, new features that cannot be easily implemented across all three standards will be implemented first for DASH, and later (if at all) for SmoothStreaming and HLS. Which is yet another reason to choose DASH!
