
Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/adobe-throws-in-towel-adopts-http-live-streaming-for-ios.ars
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Terretta
Finally! RTMP is an abomination. Now let's get Apple HTTP Adaptive Bitrate
Streaming and SSTP into Flash Player too.

Biased feature comparison: [http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/792/adaptive-
streaming-compar...](http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/792/adaptive-streaming-
comparison)

~~~
DarkShikari
Regardless of how much of an "abomination" RTMP is, Apple's system is a huge
hack:

1\. It's taking a transport stream format based around a buffering model...
but as far as I can tell, completely ignoring the actual buffering model
itself. Instead of working within the MPEG buffering model, it simply makes
some arbitrary restrictions on the size of each chunk, which doesn't make any
sense.

2\. Aggravated by 1), the latency of the system is horrible. Good luck using
"HTTP live streaming" for anything that needs less than 5 seconds of latency,
let alone 0.05 seconds.

I can implement a videoconferencing system in RTMP. I sure as heck can't do it
with "HTTP live streaming".

Now, does it work well for some use-cases? Sure, but it's definitely not a
replacement for all aspects of RTMP.

(Also, obviously as you mentioned the link is biased, but it's actually not
even relevant to your post: it's comparing Adobe's software to Microsoft's
software, _not_ comparing protocols. Talking about Adobe's software is very
silly when nearly everyone actually uses Red5, Wowza, etc. For example, it
mentions that the latency is ~6 seconds, but the company I work for has that
down to ~100 times less.)

~~~
Terretta
Absolutely love your work, btw.

Not a huge fan of HLS for our customers even with libraries of tens of
thousands of full length movies serving to iOS. Latency is the number one
complaint. Meanwhile, to your point, we churn out video broadcasting sites for
clients on RTMP.

EDIT:(We support server side PPM on RTSP, RTMP, and both Apple and Microsoft
adaptive HTTP, from WMS, IIS Media Services, Wowza, DSS, and FMS. This makes
us pretty familiar with the buffering approaches, and agree with you, Apple's
is essentially broken. That said, the value of being able to leverage a more
"commodity" HTTP infrastructure is huge.)

Been meaning to talk to you some time about x264 in the near real time mode.
Drop me contact info to my user name at gmail?

PS. We use both Red5 and Wowza, but usually Wowza for these kinds of projects,
which we have deployed CDN-wide.

~~~
DarkShikari
Added my email to my profile.

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huxley
Not sure if it is a factor but Wowza has supported HTTP Live Streaming for a
while, maybe they've been eating at a bit of Flash Media Server's market
share.

~~~
andymoe
Speaking of streaming servers, does anyone have experience with erlyvideo in
production?

<http://erlyvideo.org>

I have it up and running on my mac - the web UI could use some love though.

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MikeW
As far as I can tell, there are no Open Source streaming servers that support
(realtime) HTTP Live Streaming. I think this is a massive shame and I would
LOVE to see one.

So I think it makes great sense for Adobe to add support for this as there are
so few HTTP Live Streaming solutions out there right now.

~~~
wazoox
VLC apparently streams on http. Is it the same thing?
<http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo_New>

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mkramlich
I'm building a video post-production workflow system for a client in Hollywood
currently so this kind of news is very welcomed. Anything that makes it easier
to stream and/or gives me more choices and less compatibility issues is great.

~~~
chopsueyar
Forget FMS, check out Wowza.

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andymoe
Good. I would expect, and hope for, support for http streaming on Amazons
CloudFront service soon since they use Adobe's media server already. [1] This
would be really helpfully for some indie iOS developers.

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/>

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Fester
I hope that IETF will be safe enough to not accept 'live streaming' as a
standart. Streaming must be streamed, not mocked by winamp'ish playlists.

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chopsueyar
What is the advantage to using FMS over Wowza Media Server?

Wowza licensing appears more reasonable and flexible.

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atlbeer
Can we finally get HLS support for Windows now?

