Native Video on the Web

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TIL about the HLS video format:

HLS stands for HTTP Live Streaming. It’s an adaptive bitrate streaming protocol developed by Apple. One of those sentences to casually drop at any party. Äh. Back on track: HLS allows you to specify a playlist with multiple video sources in different resolutions. Based on available bandwidth these video sources can be switched and allow adaptive playback.

This is an interesting journey where the engineering team behind Kitchen Stories wanted to switch away from the Vimeo player (160 kB), but still use Vimeo as a video host because they provide direct video links with a Pro plan. Instead, they are using the native <video> element, a library for handling HLS, and a wrapper element to give them a little bonus UX.

This video stuff is hard to keep up with! There is another new format called AV1 that is apparently a big deal as YouTube and Netflix are both embracing it. Andrey Sitnik wrote about it here:

Even though AV1 codec is still considered experimental, you can already leverage its high-quality, low-bitrate features for a sizable chunk for your web audience (users with current versions of Chrome and Firefox). Of course, you would not want to leave users for other browsers hanging, but the attributes for <video> and <source> tags make implementing this logic easy, and in pure HTML, you don’t need to go at length to detect user agents with JavaScript.

That doesn't even mention HLS, but I suppose that's because HSL is a streaming protocol, which still needs to stream in some sort of format.

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