Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

<p>Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an <a href="/facts/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming/K3oSzyJB">adaptive bitrate streaming</a> technique that enables high quality <a href="/facts/Streaming_media/4rPhSq0Y">streaming</a> of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional <a href="/facts/HTTP/TWtvf7JD">HTTP</a> web servers. Similar to Apple's <a href="/facts/HTTP_Live_Streaming/ryHrK3aF">HTTP Live Streaming</a> (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over <a href="/facts/HTTP/TWtvf7JD">HTTP</a>. An early HTTP web server based streaming system called SProxy was developed and deployed in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 2006. It showed how to use HTTP range requests to break the content into small segments. SProxy shows the effectiveness of segment based streaming, gaining best Internet penetration due to the wide deployment of firewalls, and reducing the unnecessary traffic transmission if a user chooses to terminate the streaming session earlier before reaching the end. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.
</p><p>MPEG-DASH is the first adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution that is an international standard. MPEG-DASH should not be confused with a transport protocol — the transport protocol that MPEG-DASH uses depends on which version of HTTP is used: <a href="/facts/Transmission_Control_Protocol/WW4sPrt9">TCP</a> over HTTP and <a href="/facts/HTTP%2f2/L7V7rfeP">HTTP/2</a>, or <a href="/facts/User_Datagram_Protocol/dxLU0D6q">UDP</a> over <a href="/facts/HTTP%2f3/SUASQpzB">HTTP/3</a>. MPEG-DASH uses existing HTTP web server infrastructure that is used for delivery of essentially all World Wide Web content. It allows devices like Internet-connected televisions, TV set-top boxes, desktop computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. to receive multimedia content (video, TV, radio, etc.) delivered via the Internet, coping with variable Internet receiving conditions. Standardizing an adaptive streaming solution is meant to provide confidence to the market that the solution can be adopted for universal deployment, compared to similar but more proprietary solutions like <a href="/facts/Smooth_Streaming/K3oSzyJB">Smooth Streaming</a> by Microsoft, or <a href="/facts/HTTP_Dynamic_Streaming/K3oSzyJB">HDS</a> by Adobe. Unlike HDS, or Smooth Streaming, DASH is <a href="/facts/Agnostic_(data)/RdAjXs6a">codec-agnostic</a>, which means it can use content encoded with any <a href="/facts/Video_coding_format/Dmzykxmn">coding format</a>, such as <a href="/facts/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding/6gp7DC1a">H.265</a>, <a href="/facts/H.264%2fMPEG-4_AVC/soCzKcmJ">H.264</a>, <a href="/facts/VP9/dBP8ffoc">VP9</a>, etc.
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Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP open-in-new

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP