Factsheet¶
Table of Contents
Supported Players¶
| Protocol | Player |
|---|---|
| HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) | Flash Player 10.1, Flowplayer, Adobe OSMF, Strobe, Adobe Air |
| HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) | iPhone, iPod Touch, 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.) Android 3 or later |
| HTTP Smooth Streaming (HSS) | Silverlight 3 or later, XBox, Windows Phone |
| MPEG-DASH | Inside Secure, BuyDRM, Opera, castLabs, Dash.js, Vualto, BitMovin, Adobe, JWPLayer Intertrust Wasabi Marlin Client SDK, THEOplayer |
| Progressive MP4 (VOD) | Android 2.2/3, legacy players, STBs |
| HbbTV 1.5 | 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?.
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) |
| Discretix PlayReady | HLS (TS) |
| Irdeto SKE | HLS (TS) |
| Irdeto PlayReady | HLS (TS) |
| Irdeto PRSL | 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 Codecs¶
| Codec | Type | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| AOMedia AV1 (av1-isobmff v1.0.0) | Video | MPEG-DASH (no DRM) |
| 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 | 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 |
| Fraunhofer HE-AAC multichannel | Audio | MPEG-DASH |
| MPEG 1-Audio Layer 3 | Audio | HLS |
| WMA Pro | Audio | HSS (Silverlight Only) |
Note
The Unified Streaming Platform supports all resolution 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 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 | MPEG-DASH, Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) |
| 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) | SCTE 35, DASH Event Messages ("emsg"), ID3 tags |
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 profile one of the DASH Specificiation of Live Media Ingest 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.
System Requirements¶
Recommended hardware¶
| Type | Size |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 or similar |
| RAM | 16GB |
| Storage | 1 TB |
| Ethernet | 1 Gb/s |
Note that the mentioned ethernet capability is easily maxed out, so when possible prefer 10 Gb/s.
Minimum recommended configuration¶
| Type | Size |
|---|---|
| CPU | Single core |
| RAM | 1GB |
| Storage | 8 GB |
| Ethernet | 1 Gb/s |
This kind of configuration is typically encountered in cloud environments when scaling horizontally.
Supported Operating Systems¶
| OS | Version |
|---|---|
| Alpine | 3 |
| CentOS | 7/8 |
| Ubuntu | 18/20 |
| Windows Server | 2016 |
Redhat and Oracle Linux are possible as well, based on the CentOS build.
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 Support¶
Unified Streaming Platform is supported for various Operating Systems. For each OS, we aim to support at least two major (LTS) versions: the latest as well as the previous release. Below table shows an overview of sunset dates for each target platform.
To avoid running our software on an unsupported platform, we recommend using a recent OS version. Because different distributions rotate at a different pace, the upgrade horizon differs as well. Customers using CentOS should typically upgrade their OS every 3-4 years, while Ubuntu LTS users should do so every 2 years and Alpine, which is typically provisioned in an automated setting (i.e. docker or LXC) should reprovision at least once per year.
| OS | Version | EOL | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alpine | 3.12 | January 2021 | |
| 3.11 | December 2020 | ||
| 3.8 | August 2020 | ||
| Amazon | 2 | June 2023 | |
| CentOS | 8 | 2025 | |
| 7 | 2023 | ||
| 6 | November 2020 | Both Apache 2.2 and Apache 2.4 | |
| Debian | 9 | December 2020 | |
| 8 | July 2020 | EOL after 1.10.23 | |
| Ubuntu | 20 | 2025 | |
| 18 | April 2023 | ||
| 16 | April 2021 | ||
| 14 | July 2020 | EOL after 1.10.23 | |
| Windows Server | 2016 | 2025 | Apache 2.4, IIS7 (Build only) |
| 2012 | August 2020 | Apache 2.4, IIS7 |