More people are getting connected to the internet and more videos are being watched on each day. In other words, each of us watching more videos on each day and according to Cisco, video watching times will become fourfold by 2020.
But there may be an issue about watching video on the internet because internet connection speeds usually do not let watching videos in high quality so that player needs buffering and this makes you wait while watching the video.
In order to give a better user experience, service providers create lower resolutions of the videos to make people watch videos seamlessly even if their network condition is not good enough to watch HD videos. This is called adaptive streaming or adaptive bitrate streaming or dynamic adaptive streaming. So that you do not wait for the player to buffer.
Lowering the resolutions of videos for recorded streams is not a big deal. However, doing the same job for live streams on the fly is not as easy as recorded streams. Nevertheless, Ant Media Server supports adaptive bitrate streaming in Enterprise Edition and live streams can be played with HLS(Http Live Streaming).
To watch adaptive bitrate streaming for live streams, please use “_adaptive” suffix for m3u8 files. I mean if there is a live stream in the server with name “test” then play
http://{server.url}:5080/{app.name}/streams/test_adaptive.m3u8
Additionally, you may choose the resolutions of adaptive streaming by specifying them in the bean configuration file of your app under WEB-INF directory like below
<bean id=“app.settings” class=“io.antmedia.AppSettings” >
<property name=“adaptiveResolutionList”>
<list>
<value>1080</value>
<value>720</value>
<value>360</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
The configuration above will create videos at 1080p, 720p and 360p resolutions if the video’s resolution is higher than 1080p. If there will be a live stream with a 480p resolution, then 480p and 360p versions of this video will be created on the fly.
Lastly, we know that this feature makes some enterprises interested because this kind of service generally costs much, and Ant Media Server provides cost-effective solutions for enterprises. Anyway, If you have any questions, please drop a comment or send an email to contact@antmedia.io to join the slack channel for instant support.
