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we are developing a mobile application which will need to play 10 seconds videos.

The first version will only support iOS (iPhone & iPad). To have a good quality on all devices we will use Adaptive Streaming.

I thorougly read the Apple HLS documentation and it seems that 10 seconds is a good tradeoff for the size of the HLS segments.

So if we use the default 10 seconds in our case segmentation is not really useful.

As we are on a Mobile app with very small videos I'm wondering if for some devices / network conditions changing this 10s "default" to a smaller value could be better ?

Is it possible to speed-up the starting of the video by lowering this value ?

I suppose the 10 seconds "default" we find everywhere is a good choice and advice for videos which have to be played "everywhere" (Desktop, Smartphone, Tablet), but perhaps an other value would be more appropriate for Smartphones only ?

Finally do you think that in our case HLS is not a good choice and that simply using progressive download of an MP4 video is better?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Khawar Ali
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Baptiste Gaillard
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1 Answers1

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Mp4 will be better. Adaptive streaming works well for long content, but very poorly for short videos. The player will not have enough time to to adapt, and your viewers you almost always just see the default quality.

Apple only requires HLS for videos that are longer than X seconds (I cant remember exactly what X is, but it is larger than 10)

szatmary
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  • Hi Matthew and thanks for those informations. As we also want to support Android later its good to use MP4 videos with progressive download only. Because we want to always have good quality depending on the device do you know if solutions exist to automatically pick the right video depending on the width/height/connection quality (cell/3G/4G) ? Or do we have to implement heuristics to implement such a system ourself ? For example if we are on an iPhone 1 (480x320) the system would pick the 400x300.mp4 video,with an iPad1 (1024x768) is would pick the 1280x960.mp4 video. Thanks – Baptiste Gaillard May 15 '14 at 13:56