Factsheet

Supported Codecs

Codec

Type

Comment

AOMedia AV1 (av1-isobmff v1.2.0)

Video

HLS, MPEG-DASH

H.265 / HEVC (ISO/IEC 23008-2)

Video

HLS, MPEG-DASH, HSS

H.264 / AVC3 (ISO/IEC 14496-10)

Video

DVB-DASH

H.264 / AVC1 (ISO/IEC 14496-10)

Video

All formats

VC-1 / SMPTE 421M

Video

HSS (Silverlight only)

VP9

Video

MPEG-DASH

DTS HD/Express

Audio

HLS, HSS, MPEG-DASH

DTS:X (DTS-UHD profile 2)

Audio

MPEG-DASH

AAC / MPEG 4-AAC (LC, HE) (ISO/IEC 14496-3)

Audio

All formats

Dolby Digital (AC-3)

Audio

HLS, HSS, MPEG-DASH

Dolby Digital+ (EC-3)

Audio

HLS, HSS, MPEG-DASH

Dolby Atmos

Audio

HLS, MPEG-DASH

Dolby AC-4

Audio

MPEG-DASH (single and multiple presentation)

FLAC

Audio

MPEG-DASH, HLS (fMP4)

Fraunhofer HE-AAC multichannel

Audio

MPEG-DASH

xHE-AAC

Audio

MPEG-DASH

MPEG 1-Audio Layer 3

Audio

HLS

WMA Pro

Audio

HSS (Silverlight Only)

Note

The Unified Streaming Platform supports all resolutions up to 4K, and even higher resolutions should not pose any immediate problems either. However, do note that to successfully deliver 4K to Apple devices using HLS, using fMP4 HLS is required (so, not HLS TS).

Supported DRM systems

DRM

Protocol

AES-128

HLS (TS)

SAMPLE-AES

HLS (TS & fMP4)

FairPlay DRM

HLS (TS & fMP4)

China DRM

HLS (TS)

Conax PlayReady

HLS (TS)

Irdeto PlayReady

HLS (TS)

PlayReady Envelope

HLS (TS)

Verimatrix VCAS

HLS (TS)

Adobe Primetime DRM

MPEG-DASH, HDS, HLS (TS)

Cisco VG

MPEG-DASH, HLS (TS)

Latens Titanium URM (Arris)

MPEG-DASH

Marlin

MPEG-DASH, HLS (TS)

Microsoft PlayReady

MPEG_DASH, HLS (fMP4), HSS

Nagra Media PRM

MPEG-DASH, HLS (TS)

ViaccesOrca (VODRM)

MPEG-DASH

Widevine

MPEG-DASH, HLS (fMP4)

Supported Encoders

Our software is compatible with the output of encoders from a wide variety of vendors, like Ateme, Beamr, Cisco, AWS Elemental, Harmonic, Media Excel and Telestream.

For Live, all encoders that produce output according to interface 1 of the Interface 1 of the DASH-IF Live Media Ingest specification are supported.

For VOD, the basic requirement is that your audio and video content is contained in ISO BMFF (i.e., (f)MP4) with GOP alignment across bitrates and all video fragments starting with an IDR frame. For text and timed metadata, additional formats are supported: Supported Ingest. Also, a HLS stream that adheres to a strict set of requirements may be used as ingest for Unified Origin for VOD (although this is not recommended): Using HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) as source.

Furthermore, content should be encoded in one of the Supported Codecs for both Live and VOD.

Supported Formats

Format

Version

DVB-DASH

DVB-DASH specification (ETSI TS 103 285)

HbbTV

1.5 (MPEG-DASH), 2.0 (DVB-DASH)

HDS

Version 1 and version 2 (late binding)

HLS

Version 1 to 7 (Both TS and fMP4)

MPEG-DASH

ISO/IEC 23009-1 section 8.3 (ISO BMFF On Demand profile)

MPEG-DASH

ISO/IEC 23009-1 section 8.4 (ISO BMFF Live profile)

MPEG-DASH

ISO/IEC 23009-1 section 8.5 (ISO BMFF Main profile)

MPEG-DASH

ISO/IEC 23009-1 section 8.6 (MPEG-2 TS Main profile)

MPEG-DASH

DASH-AVC/264 section 6.3

HSS

PIFF 1.0, 1.1

Supported Ingest

Format

Comment

CMAF

ISO/IEC 23000-19 Common Media Application Format

fragmented MP4

Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF), MPEG-DASH (VOD only)

MP4

ISO/IEC 14496-14

F4M Live

Adobe Media Server, Wowza

HLS

VOD only, see Using HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) as source

Common File Format (CFF)

ISO/IEC 14496-12

TTML (SMPTE-TT, EBU-TT, DFXP), SRT, ISMT, WebVTT

Subtitle/Captions input/output formats

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+, HLG

Timed Metadata (ISO BMFF)

MPEG-B part 18, SCTE 35, DASH Event Messages ("emsg"), ID3 tags

Supported Players

Protocol

Player

HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)

iPhone, iPad (iOS 3.0 or later), QuickTime Player (10.0 or later), Safari (4.0 or later on Snow Leopard), Other HLS compatible players (JWPlayer, Inside Secure, NexPlayer - e.a.)

MPEG-DASH

DASH.js, Shaka PLayer, Bitmovin Player JW Player, NexPlayer, THEOplayer, Android 3 or later, Intertrust Wasabi Marlin Client SDK

HTTP Smooth Streaming (HSS)

Silverlight 3 or later, XBox, Windows Phone

HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS)

Flash Player 10.1, Flowplayer, Adobe OSMF, Strobe, Adobe Air

Progressive MP4 (VOD)

Android 2.2/3, legacy players, STBs

HbbTV 1.5, 2.0

LG, Samsung, Panasonic

Connected TV

Samsung, LG, Phillips, Sony, Panasonic

For MPEG_DASH playout see also Which devices support DASH playback? and Which browsers support DASH playback?.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems

Please see which OS and wich version is supported in the 'End Of Life' section below.

Redhat and Oracle Linux are possible as well, based on the Rocky Linux builds.

Supported Webservers

Webserver

Version

OS

Comment

Apache

2.4

Windows, Linux

VOD & LIVE

Attention

NGINX DEPRECATION!

Going forward, we limit our support for new installations to Apache and recommend a switch to Apache for setups currently running on NGINX. We will continue to support NGINX for existing customers for both VOD and Live, but we won't work on feature development for it. In short, support for NGINX should be considered deprecated. Do note that this does not affect our recommendations of using NGINX in other parts of your video streaming setup, such as for (shield) caching.

See also What is the preferred webserver for media delivery? for a detailed outline and background.

End Of Life

Unified Streaming Platform is available for various Operating Systems. We always try to stay current and we will cease development on a particular OS release before the OS vendor's end of life of that OS release.

To allow for a smooth OS upgrade cycle, we aim to have some overlap and simultaneously support both the latest major (LTS) versions and the previous. We recommend using this grace period to for side-by-side comparison.

Because different distributions rotate at a different pace, the upgrade horizon differs as well. Customers using Ubuntu LTS should typically upgrade every 2 years, while Alpine — which is typically provisioned in an automated setting (i.e. kubernetes, docker or LXC) — should re-provision at least once per year.

Below table shows an overview of sunset dates for each target platform. We recommend using a recent OS release with our software to avoid depending on artifacts that are close to sunset.

Distributions that we no longer support are available under the unsupported subpath. E.g. for CentOS 7 packages previously available at: https://stable.yum.unified-streaming.com/ can still be downloaded from: https://stable.yum.unified-streaming.com/unsupported/centos/7/x86_64/

OS

Version

EOL

Comment

Alpine

3.19

December 2024

For x86_64 (Intel) and aarch64 (ARM)

3.18

May 2024

For x86_64 (Intel) and aarch64 (ARM)

3.17

November 2023

EOL after 1.12.14

Amazon

2

July 2023

EOL after 1.12.9

CentOS

7

January 2023

EOL after 1.12.0

Debian

12

June 2024

11

December 2023

10

March 2022

EOL after 1.11.13

Rocky Linux

9

January 2026

8

January 2025

Ubuntu

22

January 2026

For x86_64 (Intel) and aarch64 (ARM)

20

January 2025

For x86_64 (Intel) and aarch64 (ARM)

18

April 2023

EOL after 1.12.4

Windows Server

2016

2025

Apache 2.4, IIS7 (Build only)