MPEG DASH's Future: Unified Format or DASHed Hopes?

[Editor's note: This article was written before the 批准MPEG DASH标准.] 

Without a doubt, the most popular session at 流媒体 West was a panel discussion called MPEG DASH: Driving the Growth of Streaming Using the New HTTP St和ard, 哪个拉了一个站立的房间, 溢出的人群, some of whom had snuck away from the HTML5 Video Summit to see what the hubbub was all about.

这应该能告诉你一些东西. HTML5 is the hottest topic in online video right now; there was little chatter 和 exactly zero sessions about MPEG DASH in May at 流媒体 East. 但与HTML5不同的是, HDS, HLS, or any of the other acronyms that have dem和ed our attention in recent months, MPEG DASH actually holds the promise of bringing some consistency to the oft-fragmented world of streaming — if it passes ratification 和 if it is fully implemented.

在短暂的, MPEG DASH is an emerging ISO st和ard for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP, one that could potentially supersede the proprietary approaches of Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming, Adobe的动态流媒体, 以及苹果的HTTP 在线直播. 该标准将于2012年初定稿, 和 all three of the aforementioned companies — as well as others including Netflix, 公司.; Qualcomm, 公司.; 和 Cisco Systems, 公司. — have been integral contributors to the DASH working group.

MPEG DASH的吸引力是显而易见的. Content publishers would be able to generate a single set of files — based on DASH’s st和ardized “manifest” — that would play on all devices, reducing both technical headaches 和 transcoding costs 和 preventing consumers from having to worry about whether the devices they have in their h和s or living rooms will be able to play the content they want to watch. 流媒体 contributing editor Tim Siglin wrote a white paper on the fragmented MPEG-4 format for Transitions, 公司., 由Adobe和微软赞助, that provides a good deal of technical underpinnings of MPEG DASH; it’s available on Tim’s 工作流 博客.

Siglin 和 fellow contributing editor Jan Ozer both spent a considerable portion of late November obsessing, 争论, 和 writing about MPEG DASH 和 the accompanying common 加密和文件格式. The fruits of their labors can be found in various 文章 on StreamingMedia.com(见 CFF:一种格式统治一切? 和 什么是MPEG DASH? 特别是). So it’s clear that the promise of “one format to rule them all” is one that thrills most of us in the industry.