Client side dynamic bitrate adjustment

[jabbera 23]

I recently started sharing my library across multiple users most of whom are on remote networks. I'd really like clients to dynamically adjust the requested bitrate based upon the network congestion at the time. (Ala netflix) When the client starts to buffer I'd like them to switch to a lower quality. I realize that it would require a restart of the transcode, or starting a transcode in the case of Direct Stream. I also realize that there are lot of reasons for buffering that aren't strictly bandwidth related.

 

I spent some time browsing the code and there is a DynamicHlsService that seems to implement avialablility of multiple streams except it doesn't seem to use much logic for determining the available bitrates aside from variance and 2*variance. I also haven't found any obvious places where this functionality is used. Can someone point me in the right direction? Any ideas for clients that don't support HLS? If somehow progress reporting was fed back into the transcoding process, the server could detect this and lower the bitrate automatically and restart the transcode.

 

Thanks for your time!

Edited August 4, 2014 by jabbera

[Luke 37238]

adaptive bitrate streaming within HLS is how clients do it. the server returns three sources within the HLS playlist at varying btirates.

 

for the clients that don't support HLS, most of them support mpeg-dash which we'll soon incorporate. and that has the same type of thing.

[jabbera 23]

I started reading the roku spec after I posted this and they automatically support it via HLS. How cool! Why only the 2 additional options for quality?

[Luke 37238]

yea, hopefully after mobile sync