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Greetings,
I’m planning to get FV Player and stream HLS. Got two questions.
1. H.264 is supported everywhere, while H.265 is not widely supported, but has better compression. I would like to find out how I can stream H.265 if the device supports it, then fall back to H.264 if it doesn’t.
2. HLS automatically selects the stream based on the connection’s speed. What if the screen resolution is HD (720p), but the connection can support Full HD (1080p)? Will a Full HD stream be called? If so, that will be a waste of bandwidth, because the device’s screen only supports HD. I would like the stream to match the device’s screen resolution. How can that be done? Or is it done automatically?
Regards,
Nich
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Hello Nich,
1) It appears you can use VP9 codec for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Android in a WebM container and H265 in an MP4 container for Safari and iOS: https://foliovision.com/support/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/how-to/mkv-vp9-and-mp4-h265-on-one-video#post-74297
However streaming the video from a single file is not perfect and something like like HLS is much better.
You can actually create a HLS stream where you provide a mix of streams with H265 and H264 codecs. I was able to setup that up here: https://foliovision.com/player/demos/hls-stream -> “HLS STREAM WITH H265 AND H264 CODECS”
I used AWS MediaConvert. You have to pick the CMAF output type with Segmented Files to make sure the HLS stream will use fMP4 segments (.m4s) rather than TS as iOS doesn’t support H265 in TS.
In that video there is 1080p video with H265 and 360p with H264, so you can tell what you are getting. I get the 1080p stream on iPad 6th generation just fine. Although it won’t play for me in Safari 12.1.1 on macOS 10.12.6 – no H265 HLS plays for me there.
2) FV Player will limit the video resolution to the player size. See that if you play the “AWS MediaConvert” video on https://foliovision.com/player/demos/encrypted-hls-stream You only get 720p or 1080p if you go fullscreen.
On desktop computers this is done with the HLS.js library, on iOS it uses it’s own HLS engine which is even better.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Video,
At this point, H265 support is limited. H265 only really runs properly on devices with dedicated hardware support (and software drivers for it). We will be adding additional H265 support as H265 slowly acquires support among streaming services over the next couple of years.
As Martin explained, FV Player does support H265 but setting up the streaming is a lot of trouble. It’s too early to troubleshoot H265 issues as part of our standard plugin license. So you are in for either a lot of troubleshooting yourself or you’ll have to pick up pro support incidents to have us troubleshoot your H265 issues for you.
