IPTV OTT Encoding & Streaming

DASH stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, an adaptive bitrate streaming technology where a multimedia file is partitioned into one or more segments and delivered to a client using HTTP. It is very similar to HLS. The main difference is that DASH does not restrict stream codecs, allowing any encoding to be used for content delivery.

Stream from MPEG-DASH Feed

Like M3U8 in HLS, DASH utilizes a XML-based media presentation description (.MPD) file to describe segment information (timing, URL, media characteristics like video resolution and bit rates), and can be organized in different ways such as SegmentList, SegmentTemplate, SegmentBase and SegmentTimeline.

Two main types of SegmentTemplate are used to describe video segments in MPD: number-based and time-based. Some DASH demuxers only support number-based segments, but IPVTL can stream from time-based segments as well.

Stream MPEG-DASH

Like HLS, IPVTL DOES NOT output MPEG-DASH stream directly. Instead, it generates MPEG-DASH playlist (.mpd) and segments (.m4s) on your local disk. These files can then be fed to web server like Nginx, Apache or Microsoft IIS to provide MPEG-DASH streaming to end players.

In the Windows version, the default output playlist file is C:\media\ipvt_ch##.mpd. Segments are generated at C:\media\init-stream##.m4s and C:\media\chunk-stream##-#####.m4s. You can edit the Target URL to change it to your preferred folder and file name. Make sure to place them in your web server's publishing directory so they can be accessed from the internet.