Spring has sprung. Know what else has?
A new version of our software.
No need to scour the release notes for Easter eggs. They’re all out there in the open.
For GA release 1.15.20, we deliver features, fixes, and finessings to facilitate your day-to-day streaming operations. It’s all about smoothness. Here are a few highlights from the release notes.
🐇 libfmp4: more lenient processing of WebVTT subtitles, with overlapping ranges and timestamps going backwards
For customers with large archives of old media, with suboptimally written subtitles, we present this fix.
Now, even if you’ve got a buggy authoring tool, or just sloppy subtitles, it’s not a problem. We aim to please. We aim to be more forgiving. A library of fragmented mp4s won’t break or fail if subtitles overlap each other, or if their timing is a bit wonky.
🐇 Added --dref_base_url for Unified Packager
With this new feature, you can more easily package so-called dref files, which refer to remotely stored media. In other words, they refer to media on S3 (Amazon’s, or AWS’s Simple Storage Service), and which contain all the metadata about that media.
🐇 origin: added support for keyrotation and a static CPIX document, for Unified Origin
This feature allows a Content Protection Information Exchange (CPIX) document to have multiple DRM keys in it, over different time intervals. Unified Origin will use the appropriate key for the current time, automatically.
🐇 libfmp4: move X-TIMESTAMP-MAP lines in WebVTT subtitles to just below the WEBVTT header line, to avoid confusing Safari and other HLS players
Confusion in video streaming: never a good idea. Previously, Safari and other HLS players either displayed subtitles out of sync, disrespected styling, or displayed no subtitles whatsoever.
Some browsers and players are very sensitive about the exact formatting of WebVTT subtitles. That’s just a fact. So it inspired this fix.
🐇 Origin: for closed caption tracks, optionally use the language specified in a urn:scte:dash:cc:cea-608:2015 kind box, instead of inheriting it from the parent video track
So closed captions can now use their own language setting, if provided, instead of automatically using the same language as the video. Normally, captions just copy the language of the video track. Now if there’s a special label, or tag (urn:scte:dash:cc:cea-608:2015) then the system will use the language defined there instead.
And that’s it! That's the end
Spring has sprung, after all, so go enjoy it.
For more info, and for the full list of changes in the GA, check out the release notes here.
And if you have questions, please email us at sales@unified-streaming.com.