Tutorial: Creating HLS Files in Sorenson Squeeze: Easy Peasy!

Streaming Learning Center by Jan Ozer

Apple's HTTP Live Streaming is the most widely used adaptive streaming technology today because it can play on all three screens; desktop, mobile and OTT. As you'll learn in the tutorial below, producing streams for Apple's HTTP Live Streaming is easy peasy with Sorenson Squeeze.

Yes, there is a shameless plug for an upcoming webinar on HLS creation and deployment at the end of the video. You can read more about the webinar, and why I'm producing it below:

While DASH Languishes, HLS Becomes More Useful and Accessible

Yesterday I announced a webinar titled Adaptive Streaming to Desktops and Mobile via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS): A Simple Approach; No Coding Required (more info here), which is scheduled for Tuesday, January 28th, at 2:00 PM EST. Here’s the back story on why, and why you might be interested in attending.

It’s pretty much accepted that adaptive streaming is the optimal technique for delivering to mobile and desktop viewers watching on a diverse range of devices and connection speeds. The question IS, which adaptive technology? After all, while Flash covers 96%+ on the desktop, Flash-based technologies are nowhere on mobile. While Apple’s HLS is great for iOS devices, and some Android, it's nowhere on the desktop. Sure, you could install a Wowza Media server and transmux from one format to the other, but that was technically complex. And you still needed a simple way to encode your source files into the chunks and metadata files required for HLS.

While Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) shows promise as a technology that could unify all these adaptive streaming standards into one, it made little tangible progress. And unless and until Apple agreed to support the spec, which they still haven’t, DASH would merely supplant Flash on the desktop, with HLS still necessary for mobile. It still wouldn’t provide a unified standard. As a non-programmer myself, there didn't appear to be an accessible and affordable way to deliver adaptive streams to mobile and desktop viewers.

The nickel started dropping when JW Player announced that their namesake player could allow desktop computers with Flash installed to play HLS streams. That meant one format (HLS) to desktop and mobile viewers. It’s a story that I covered for Streaming Media, but the question that I didn’t ask at the time was whether you had to be a coder to use the JW Player. More on that in a moment. read more...