Sunday, July 12, 2009

Is Apple reinventing the wheel?

I went through Apple's proposal http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-01. It is great to see Apple's push for HTTP Streaming and I appreciate the effort. But devils in details. I have different thoughts here. It looks complex as it needs, server side Segmenter. As per HTTP 1.1, server can handle Chunked transfer encoding (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 section 3.6.1 Chunked Transfer Coding). When server/client comes to an agreement about size/blocks of chunks, it can stream the video without even the requirement of Playlist (m3p8). It simplifies another call to obtain playlist.
Apple devised this approach for iPhone. And its safari is able to handle video playback natively. When streaming natively handled in HTTP and Html5 video tag and video tag playback execution knows to utilize http transfer encoding, it can do a streaming, we don't even need complex segmenter or intermediary. It is kind of pushing the problem from one place to another.

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