[Ffmpeg-devel] Adaptive Streaming???

[François Revol]

> Hi,
> I need some knowledge on what comprises of Adaptive Streaming.
> I have been hearing this for quite some time, especially in the 
> context of 
> network bandwidth adaptation.
> I wanted to know if the file would be re-encoded to a different bit 
> rate for 
> network adaptation or a portion of it.
> coz, if the whole whole is encoded, as for the network congestion, 
> the next 
> stream of packets may need to be encoded in a different rate, hence 
> the 
> original encoding may not be useful.

Starting from the real "surestream" thingy, afaik the basic way of 
things is:
the source is always encoded at multiple bitrate, and the player asks 
whichever bitrate it wants depending on the congestion it detected 
recently.
The change probably happens only on keyframes though.
The source must always be encoded at all bitrates, since not all 
players might want the same bitrate at the same time anyway.
For static files, they just have several video (and maybe audio) 
streams, and are hinted for the server. Like quicktime but others 
including asf do this as well.

Fran?ois.