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I was reading about HLS and DASH. I was going through this post Difference between HLS and DASH. One of the difference I found is that HLS supports only H264 video codec and DASH is completely codec agnostic. I have some questions.

  1. Why HLS is considered to be codec dependent?

  2. How HLS is codec dependent? My understanding is that HLS has a .M3U8 file which contains URL and other information of different representations. Client applicartion can fetch .ts media files from the required URL depending on the available bandwidth.

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  • Because it's an apple standard, so they only included the codes the apple devices supported. – szatmary Aug 20 '16 at 00:06
  • @szatmary My question was confusing, so I edited it. As I mentioned, as per my understanding .M3U8 file will have segment informations like segment duration, resolution, bitrate, timestamp etc. How come it is codec dependant? I didn't get that part. – MayurK Aug 20 '16 at 02:04
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    Is codec dependent just because the standard said it was codec dependent. You can put any codec into the TS, but an HLS player may not play it because the standard said the don't have too. I suspect you are looking for a technical reason. There isn't one. – szatmary Aug 20 '16 at 02:08
  • Yeah. I was thinking about technical reasons. I am wondering why they have put this codec constraint if there is no valid reason. :) – MayurK Aug 20 '16 at 03:06
  • No support on Apple hardware, hence no support in apple defined standards. Why would Apple say "use any codec you like" and then it not work on an iPhone? It would be confusing. – szatmary Aug 20 '16 at 03:15
  • App developer can bundle software codecs and continue to use HLS right? – MayurK Aug 20 '16 at 03:19
  • Not really. Unless you develop the download engine and stream parser and video decoder and media player in addition. And if you do that why use HLS in the first place? Use a standard that does what you want. – szatmary Aug 20 '16 at 03:23

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