[Bug 675625] [dashbin] a streaming client supporting the new MPEG DASH standard

[GStreamer (bugzilla.gnome.org)]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675625
  GStreamer | gst-plugins-bad | 0.10.23

--- Comment #2 from Gianluca Gennari <gennarone at gmail.com> 2012-05-08 09:39:54 UTC ---
While hlsdemux and dashbin implement similar functionalities, they are
completely different from an architectural point of view.
hlsdemux serializes the downloads, while dashbin implements several parallel
download pipelines.

This has some advantages:

1) Less latency: suppose we have to download several adaptation sets (let's
say, 2 views of an H.264/MVC stream): serializing them, we have to buffer an
entire segment of the base view, and then we can start playing the sequence
when we finally start downloading the dependent view.
With parallel downloads, both views are downloaded at the same time, with no
further latency; if we consider an H.264/SVC video sequence with 3 layers,
things get even worse. Also, segments in DASH are usually longer than in HLS
(10-15 seconds).

2) Suppose we have multiple alternative servers available in the manifest file:
with parallel downloads, the client can choose a different server for each
adaptation set;
or we may have to download a particular audio track from a secondary server:
with parallel downloads, we avoid switching back and forth between the servers,
keeping the HTTP connections always open.

3) multiple concurrent downloads often give an higher throughput than a single
one.

Of course, nothing prevents to implement DASH support in hlsdemux: the
mpdcommon library should provide the needed parsing functions.

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