What is the difference between HLS and MPEG-DASH?

Question

It seems both protocol does the same thing but is there a advantage of one over the other?

Answer 1

MPEG-DASH is a vendor independent, international standard ratified by ISO/IEC MPEG. Previous adaptive streaming technologies - such as Apple HLS – have been released by vendors with limited support of company-independent streaming servers as well as playback clients. As such a vendor-dependent situation is not desired, standardization bodies started a harmonization process, resulting in the ratification of MPEG-DASH.

In the recent years, MPEG-DASH has been integrated into new standardization efforts, e.g., the HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE) enabling the DASH playback via the HTML5 video and audio tag (in contrast to Apple HLS which depends on FLASH on platforms outside of the Apple ecosystem), as well as the HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) enabling DRM-protected playback in web browsers. Furthermore, DRM-protection with MPEG-DASH is harmonized across different systems with the MPEG-CENC (Common Encryption), and MPEG-DASH playback on different SmartTV platforms is enabled via the integration in HbbTV 1.5 and 2.0.

While MPEG-DASH is codec and container agnostic Apple HLS is, e.g., bound to the MP2TS container. There are also many more differences.