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Comment by ofrzeta | Hacker News Reader

I am not so sure about using DASH. It's becoming a royalty source for the MPEG LA: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...

FWIW we are using HLS for live streaming with a fallback of RTMP to Flash for super legacy browsers.

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You have a good point here. I would question the wisdom of falling back to Flash, though. Native support of both dash AND hls in web browsers is terrible.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg-dash

https://caniuse.com/#feat=http-live-streaming

HLS can be done in much the same fashion as described in my article with https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/tree/master I might do a follow-up with the necessary changes.

Why not use html5 video? I actually don't have a good idea of the ven diagram surrounding the layers or overlap in functionality. Is there a reason DASH is necessary?

This does leverage html5 video, but without some help html5 video doesn't support live streaming. The browser expects all videos to be finite. This works by stringing together a series of finite videos indefinitely. DASH can also be used to offer different streams at various bitrates.

That makes sense. Is it really so complex that there needs to be a licensed technology?

Not in my opinion, no, but the MPEG group is notorious for abusing their patents.

Thanks for the quality article. I was going to reply with the same; why not use HLS. The point of poor support, especially in Chrome, is a good one, though.

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