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0 pointsmikeryan7y ago0 comments

html5 video out of the box doesn't consistently provide support for most sorts of adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/Dash being the pre-eminent ones). Using a single bitrate mp4 has no way to adjust for performance and is usually going to be less than ideal.

Noting that most player still use the video tag under the hood, but a lot of functionality has been pushed to the Media Extensions layer for different formats of video.

Using HLS with HLS.js or Dash with Dash.js is the "Simple" way of adding adaptive bitrate support to HTML5 Video tag for better performance. After that its your video delivery pipeline.

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favorited7y ago· 1 in thread

> html5 video out of the box doesn't consistently provide support for most sorts of adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/Dash being the pre-eminent ones)

Can you elaborate on this? I use <video> to debug HLS issues all the time. Is there something specific that straight-up video tag won't do?

If there are edge cases I'm sure I haven't seen them, because personally I'm only ever using HTML as basically a control group when reproducing bug reports from native video player stuff.

mikeryanOP7y ago

https://www.lambdatest.com/HTTP-Live-Streaming(HLS)

HLS Isn’t supported natively in a lot of browsers. Chrome doesn’t. It’s pretty easy to shim with Media Extensions so it’s fine to use but just sticking it as a src property in a lot of browsers it won’t work.

Personally I think that the Media Extensions API is going to be the primary mechanism for adding new codecs and transports moving forward as opposed to having the browsers need to implement all the options.

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