I think the VLC media player supports HLS on multiple platforms.

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Ruediger Rolf <[email protected]>wrote:

> After one week I have to add 2 more findings to my H.264 experiments:
> - When rescaling you should be aware that the dimensions of your video
> must stay even numbers. If you use the ffmpeg option "-vf scale=200:-1" you
> might be unlucky that your hight can get an odd number.
> - streaming of h.264 files to mobile devices will require multiple
> streaming techniques [4].
>
> And now for me the interesting question would be, who has more experience
> with these different streaming techniques:
> - RTMP worked very reliable for us for several years now with FLV videos.
> Additional to any desktop PC that has Flash installed it works in our
> Android and iOS app [5]. Unfortunately it does not work with H.264 on iOS
> (but on Android).
> - HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) is Adobes approach to http-streaming. I
> never used it yet, and again it does not work on iOS. I have not tried it
> on other plattforms yet.
> - HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is Apples approach on http-streaming. This now
> works for iOS only and the latest Mac OS version. You cannot use it on
> Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS 10.6 (try it yourself [6]). So I'm
> wondering why such a bad supported format is currently so highly requested.
> Does anyone here have experience with HLS yet?
>
> I'm currently considering to switch back to FLV as everything seemed much
> easier with this format.
>
> Regards
> Rüdiger
>
> [4] 
> http://forums.adobe.com/**message/4100805<http://forums.adobe.com/message/4100805>
> [5] 
> http://vm193.rz.uni-**osnabrueck.de/matterhorn2go/**index_en.html<http://vm193.rz.uni-osnabrueck.de/matterhorn2go/index_en.html>
> [6] 
> https://developer.apple.com/**resources/http-streaming/**examples/<https://developer.apple.com/resources/http-streaming/examples/>
>
> On 16.04.2012 17:05, Ruediger Rolf wrote:
>
>> Dear fellow Matterhorn users,
>>
>> as we start to use our Matterhorn 1.3 in these days, I wanted to improve
>> our workflow definitions. I decided that I wanted to use H.264 only, as we
>> luckly updated to a Wowza Media Server [1] that allows us to stream H.264
>> [2].
>>
>> So I created some MP4 encoding profiles, updated the multi-quality
>> workflow definition and created a HD-workflow definition based on
>> multi-quality. These updates are documented here [3].
>>
>> In creating the MP4 encodings I recognized that MP4 behaves quite
>> different from FLV. I don't know how much I like these changes and I must
>> say that FLV had some great features that I currently miss. So what has to
>> be considered when encoding MP4:
>> 1. If you want synchronous playback of two streams the two videos for
>> presenter and presentation need to have the same framerate and GOP
>> structure. If this is not given the videos can be out of sync for several
>> seconds.
>> 2. The Engage Player can only jump to key-frames. These are usually set
>> every 300 frames. That means every 10s on NTSC, 12s on PAL. If you reduce
>> the framerate to save bandwith the intervall may become even greater. You
>> can try to set the key frame interval manually, but the presets may
>> overwrite these changes. The consequence is that when you jump to a chapter
>> in the Matterhorn engage player you will not jump to the exact second but
>> to the last keyframe, that may be several seconds earlier. FLV did not have
>> this problem as the format somehow stores the reference to the keyframes in
>> the metadata.
>> 3. At least in the engage player there seems to be a problem that the
>> h.264 videos are not always lip sync, which means that the delay of audio
>> and video is more than 80ms.
>> 4. There are several "profiles" for H.264. I have not understood the
>> differences between these profiles in depth. The advantage of baseline
>> profile is that it should run on the most devices and is probably hardware
>> accelerated. So at least one of you profiles should be a basline profile.
>> From my subjective tests the lip-sync issues is not that recognizeable on
>> main and high profiles somehow.
>> 5. There are several encoding presets (from ultrafast to veryslow) for
>> x264. There is a dublication of presets ffmpeg has its own which are called
>> with the "-vpre" option and the presets from the x264 codec itself which
>> can be called with the "-preset" option. The vpre-settings create a MP4
>> that is not playable in Flash, so I recommend to use the x264 presets that
>> all seem to work fine. In my tests ultrafast was more than 10x faster than
>> veryslow. From my test-encodings I decided to use the medium setting (2-3x
>> the encoding time of ultrafast), as the video-quality seemed okay for me
>> than, but I might adjust this with more test videos around. (In general the
>> baseline profile encoded 30% in my examples than the other profiles).
>>
>> I hope my findings are helpful to others, as it seemed to me that there
>> was quite a lot chatting on IRC about using H.264.
>>
>> Rüdiger
>>
>>
>> [1] A guide on how to setup Wowza with Matterhorn can be found here:
>> http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/**display/MHDOC/Wowza+Media+**Server+3+v1.3<http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MHDOC/Wowza+Media+Server+3+v1.3>
>> [2] Red5 does not allow seeking in MP4 files somehow.
>> [3] http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/**display/MH/HD-Video+%28720p%**
>> 29+with+H.264+encoding+only<http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/HD-Video+%28720p%29+with+H.264+encoding+only>
>>
>>
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