Star Apple Proposes HTTP Streaming Feature As Protocol Standard
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 10th Jul 2009 16:25 UTC, submitted by Hakime
Internet & Networking "Apple has touted new HTTP Live Streaming features of the iPhone OS 3.0 and the upcoming Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X - and it has submitted the spec to the IETF. Will it be enough to supplant Flash as the de facto standard for delivering live or on-demand streaming online?"
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Doesn't it already work?
by Liquidator on Fri 10th Jul 2009 17:54 UTC
Liquidator
Member since:
2007-03-04

Can't we already stream a video using HTTP? I mean, you can embed a video, use a source URL like http://www.example.com/movie.wmv or http://www.example.com/movie.flv and the file plays as soon as it begins loading... Could someone clarify, please?

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RE: Doesn't it already work?
by unwiredben on Fri 10th Jul 2009 18:17 in reply to "Doesn't it already work?"
unwiredben Member since:
2009-07-10

Apple's scheme is to chop a video file into a series of MPEG2 transport files, perhaps at every 10 seconds. The main video file is a M3U file that points at all of the segments, and a streaming client will use HTTP to request a series of files. This lets the client use a fairly primitive method to start a stream at a given time offset, avoiding some of the complex issues with HTTP byte-range streaming.

It's not really that complicated, but it does offer some capabilities beyond just playing a stream from a single HTTP connection.

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RE: Doesn't it already work?
by puenktchen on Sat 11th Jul 2009 01:54 in reply to "Doesn't it already work?"
puenktchen Member since:
2007-07-27

Can't we already stream a video using HTTP? I mean, you can embed a video, use a source URL like http://www.example.com/movie.wmv or http://www.example.com/movie.flv and the file plays as soon as it begins loading... Could someone clarify, please?


that's not live streaming but video on demand. live streaming has been implemented by real, quicktime, wmp & flash with the real time streaming protocol which need special streaming servers. http streaming can use normal http-servers and needs less processing power on the server.

ms' smooth streaming for silverlight does this and this company

http://www.internetlivetv.eu/english/info.html

implements the idea with flash. apples implementation seems to be the only one with an open protocol which doesn't need one specific plugin for the webbrowser. looks like the perfect streaming solution for html5 video.

Edited 2009-07-11 01:55 UTC

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