I have been searching all around the web to try to understand how to stream videos to my android app.
I learned:
That the videos must be in the HLS or MPEG-DASH format to be adaptive for streaming .
What I mean by adaptive streaming:
The kind of streaming that allows the user to change the quality while video is streaming.
What could help me do this:
The first thing should be to encode my videos into an HLS or MPEG-DASH, for that I found a service that could do this which is Bitmovin.
The second thing is to play the adaptive video, I found two ways exoplayer and Bitmovin-player.
The problem:
I made an account on bitmovin and tried to test an mp4 video to encode, but there are too many stuff there like input, output and manifest and I don't know what URL I should use to pass to the bitmovin player to play. I encoded the video but I don't know where the reference to the enocoded video is.
My question:
1) Is my approach of streaming videos correct?
2) Can someone explain which url I must pass to the player or where I can find the video that was encoded in Bitmovin cloud?
1) Is my approach of streaming videos correct? Short answer: Yes :) Adaptive streaming is used by almost every major VoD platform out there, and a proper way to do that. Further it allows you and your viewers to either
When creating adaptive streaming content using MPEG-DASH and/or HLS as streaming format, your output would typically consist of the following:
1) Your input file (e.g. an mp4 file) will be downloaded and splitted into segments, which are being processed by the Bitmovin encoding. Out of these, it creates the different qualities the player or your viewer can choose from later.
2) This segmented output is then transferred back to your own storage, e.g. a cloud storage like AWS Simple Storage, or Google Cloud Storage. Other output types like (S)FTP and many others can be used as well.
3) In order to play your created MPEG-DASH or HLS content, a MPD manifest and/or HLS playlist needs to be created. Those are basically an index for the player, which tells it which qualities are available and where to find them to start the playback.
2) Can someone explain which url I must pass to the player or where I can find the video that was encoded in Bitmovin cloud? The URL you would have to provide to the player, has to point the MPD and/or HLS master playlist, that gets transferred to your storage. Bitmovin doesn't offer a hosting service for your encoded content, which is why you didn't find an URL to the manifest that is used. So you would need a storage first, where the encoding could be transferred to.
Give the getting started guide a try. Select your preferred API client. Then you will be guided step by step on how to integrate this encoding service. I hope this helps :)
To test the playback of the player you can also have a look at https://bitmovin.com/demos/stream-test and select "Use our defaults" which provide URL's to sample content for testing the player and playback.