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

From an application designer point of view, trying to choose one technology for video streaming services like youtube or netflix, I would say they all have theirs fall backs and you should use all of them.

Every regular video streaming service today will have two problems: client support (and you should want everything, from Smartphones, to tvs, consoles, apple tv and google chromecast) and server infrastructure.

HLS is native supported on everything Apple, runs very smooth and offers great personalization through the use of a lot of open source js video players. Android has problems, but even on 2.3 devices I have made flash player run HLS on a hybrid application. Performance sucks. But you can transcode on the fly with ffmpeg! Live streaming is also possible and very straight forward.

MPEG-DASH is really well supported on newer devices, in 5 years this talking could be over. With ngnix and rtmp extension you can build a video streaming server in half an hour.

I first chose HLS beacuse it's easy. Right now I'm creating everything HLS, WebM (lower definitions) and MPEG-DASH at the same time for different clients to allow all of them to run natively.

That way I can rely on building only Hybrid applications and use all of my AngularJS code on every client. Otherwise it would be impractical for smaller projects to embrace video streaming services. Then you have services like Wowza.