Document essential specifications and tools for encoding / packaging teams

[defagos]

As a development team we would like to optimize our company processes by ensuring streams delivered by our encoding/packaging teams match specifications. We also want to provide these teams with standard instructions and tools to validate the streams they provide.

Acceptance criteria

• Essential HLS/DASH specifications that are often incorrectly implemented (e.g. AUTOSELECT, DEFAULT) are pinpointed. Official specifications (e.g. RFC) are otherwise linked for further reference.
• Tools we currently provide/use for testing streams are documented.
• Teams have been informed.
• It is easy to filter documentation per platform only (e.g. DASH specifications are not useful for Apple platforms).

Hints

• MMF.
• Free URL entry.
• HLS tools (e.g. mediastreamvalidator).
• Proxies.
• ffprobe, mediainfo, ...

Tasks

• Write consolidated documentation for SRG SSR teams somewhere, based on individual documentations.
  • Subtitles (WebVTT vs. TTML, for example).
  • ...
• Communicate these tools to the teams and tell them they should ask for a final validation for us once they have eliminated all obvious issues they can find using these tools. These teams include:
  • SwissTXT (LSVS, LSVE, LSA).
  • RTS (on-demand DRM).
  • SRF (on-demand DRM).

[defagos]

We will stop documenting per platform. The Apple documentation will be kept for the time being but, once a consolidated documentation is available, should likely be dropped.