

Akamai launches HD Network that delivers TV-like, HD-quality video online. - sdave
http://www.akamai.com/html/misc/hdnetwork.html

======
DarkShikari
_adaptive bitrate streaming_

Ah yes, Akamai as always picking features that maximize the money you owe
them.

For the vast majority of content (e.g. anything not live), constant bitrate is
a terrible idea: it wastes bandwidth in low-action parts of the video and
cripples quality in high-action parts of the video. This is why no major non-
live video site uses constant bitrate; it's a terrible idea.

Of course, if you want to maximize user quality at all times, you want to
maximize utilization of their connection and adapt the bitrate to the
bandwidth available. But in reality, bandwidth is expensive, so nobody does
this except in live streams.

------
kvogt
For those not familiar with Akamai's current product lineup, the new features
they've introduced here are:

1) HTTP delivery of live flash content (avoids royalty fees normally paid to
Adobe for FMS, so ideally Akamai could lower their prices)

2) Improved analytics (current EdgeControl interface is tricky to use for
individual videos)

The rest of the features listed are just current features wrapped up into a
nice looking press release. In other words... move along, nothing to see here.

------
hristov
I am not sure what they mean by "HD" but this is actually slightly worse than
the HD clips on youtube.

~~~
DarkShikari
One of the primary causes of this situation is the sheer atrociousness of most
commercial video compression solutions.

Here's a little comparison I did a while back:

[http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-
content/uploads/2009/08/qual...](http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-
content/uploads/2009/08/quality_chart1.png) (full details at
<http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102>)

Now consider the fact that the majority of websites are still using VP6 or
Flash Media Encoder FLV, both of which are significantly worse than Xvid on
the chart...

Of course, given that money doesn't grow on trees, many of the top players
have switched--Youtube and Facebook are now using x264 almost exclusively, for
example.

I would be entirely unsurprised if Akamai ended up being suckered by a company
providing inferior solutions. Of course, _they_ don't lose anything by
providing worse compression, since their customers pay them for the bandwidth.

~~~
SystemOut
One of the biggest problems we've run into doing h264 streaming is that there
are a huge number of users that don't have powerful enough computers to decode
and view h264 in a flash player when it's delivered at 720p. You need a pretty
fast system to watch 720p video at even 3 Mbps in the Flash player.

And h264 over HTTP is just a download of the HTTP file starting from a
specific marker unless I'm mistaken. Not exactly rocket science. It's HTTP
after all...you can't control much of anything on the QOS side. The JW player
has the capability to do that out of the box for most of the major CDN
networks out there already.

~~~
duskwuff
The Flash player has a horrifically inefficient H264 decoder. One is almost
led to wonder, at times, if it's interpreted. (This would explain a lot.)

HTTP pseudostreaming is, indeed, just a plain HTTP GET with a URL parameter
(or an extra header) to indicate what byte position to start at, based on a
seek index at the front of the file. It's incredibly "dumb", but trivial to
implement even on a shared web host. (You can write the server-side component
in a few dozen lines of PHP, for instance.)

~~~
DarkShikari
_The Flash player has a horrifically inefficient H264 decoder. One is almost
led to wonder, at times, if it's interpreted. (This would explain a lot.)_

The reason it's slow is that the compositing engine requires that the YV12 ->
RGB conversion be done in software rather than in a hardware overlay. This is
probably exacerbated by the fact that many sites _still_ seem to turn off the
hardware accelerated display out. Note that as far as I know, all current
implementations of HTML 5 video have a similar problem (compositing engine
requires RGB input).

It's based on Mainconcept's decoder, which while not incredibly fast, isn't
particularly slow either. Though I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe stripped out
some of the assembly to try to make it smaller (or compiled it with -Os).

My advice for performance would be to disable CABAC; that can probably save
15-25% decoding time right off the bat at the cost of 10-25% compression.

~~~
SystemOut
Flash only supports hardware accelerated display when you're running full-
screen in "kiosk" mode. That is not too useful.

What we've done is sacrifice some quality and encode using one of the mobile
h264 profiles (I forget which profile off the top of my head). It essentially
outputs h264 in a form that is easier to decode on the client side. It helped
us eke out a few extra fps that helped quell an initial user revolt.

~~~
DarkShikari
That's not necessarily a good idea.

Most of the higher profile features of H.264 actually _decrease_ CPU
requirements at the same quality level, because they reduce bitrate required
for a given quality (in particular, B-frames and 8x8dct).

The only things that significantly affect CPU usage are CABAC, deblocking,
bitrate, and resolution. Sticking to a "mobile" profile (i.e. Baseline
Profile) is needlessly slashing quality.

------
chrischen
When are they going to use P2P streaming download playback? Like bittorrent
but for a youtube video? Or do they do that already?

~~~
chrischen
Found it: they do have bittorrent streaming video - <http://www.bitlet.org/>

------
jawngee
The flash demo jerked and jumped around in bandwidth a lot.

The SilverLight demo worked better, but the picture was worse than the Flash
version.

BitGravity works wonderfully though. Also, we've been using Panther/CDNetworks
without a hitch. They even support HTTP pseudo streaming.

~~~
__david__
_> The flash demo jerked and jumped around in bandwidth a lot._

Not only that it was taking 90% of my CPU to display something that did not
look even close to 720p in size. And how can they get away with calling that
looks more like 360p HD, anyway? I am not impressed.

------
sdave
Akamai probably now has the largest video distribution capacity on the
internet.

