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Video: How to Manage New Playback Challenges Associated with Next-Gen Codecs

Learn more about emerging codecs at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete video of this panel, DT102A: Managing Transition to HEVC/VP9/AV1 with Multi-Codec Streaming, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Paul MacDougall: Another challenge that we run into are the playback challenges. Things like selecting the right asset for those environments. Again, going back to the point of this, inconsistent support across different devices, you have to know what are you going to serve to that customer. You also have to know how you're going to configure your player for that.

These can be particularly challenging if you're doing something statically configured, so what we recommend is giving your player everything. Instead of looking at the user session in advance, doing something like detecting the browser version, we recommend querying the browser's capabilities with your player, into a browser environment. This is a much more efficient technique than trying to look at the user agent, parsing the user agent, which is a technique that many people employ today. Based upon that user agent, they will go and decide what asset to configure that page at before that page is loaded, or during the loading process.

The best way to do this is to go ask that browser what it is capable of, and what that device is capable of. Based upon those answers that you get from that device, then go and select one of those assets that you might have already preconfigured, that manifest that has both at H.264, that HEVC in it, that VP9. Then from that, pull in the right asset to go playback that most efficient delivery mechanism there.

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