PRESTOplay for iOS

Our range of PRESTOplay SDKs feature a common API for consistent playback behavior and simplified maintenance across different player platforms and devices. Common settings include: player configuration, ABR algorithm, latency, UI, and subtitles.

A common player API that ensures audio/subtitle tracks and video quality representations are exposed in the same way, independent of the content format (MPEG-DASH, Smooth Streaming, HLS). This saves time by allowing you to build a user interface once, independent of the actual streaming format.

Allows content representation exclusion. This checks a user device’s resolution capability and ignores ABR renditions that aren’t supported. For example, if you offer UHD quality but a user’s smartphone only supports HD, then the player will automatically exclude the UHD rendition (as long as there’s also an HD rendition available). The user receives the best quality available on their device, and you save on bandwidth for unsupported stream qualities.

Define sequences of VOD and live content to play. We enable instant content transitions with pre-caching of the next streams, multiple background players, and DRM license pre-fetching. IMA ads are also supported.

Automated recovery from connectivity loss with separate configuration for manifests, chunks, and other parameters.

We provide simplified user interface tools including easily configurable buttons, subtitles, and thumbnail views.

Accounts for non-standard manifest or MP4 files to ensure playback. Our low-level API allows us to add fixes to the player in case you have content not conforming to specifications. This is useful in case you’re dealing with non-spec conforming content libraries that you can’t update easily.

Our API simplifies Apple’s stock AVPlayer and VideoToolbox functions for extra coding efficiency.

Allows a single content file-set to be used for playback as either MPEG-DASH or HLS formats as needed. DRM can also be used with the single file-set on devices/platforms supporting the AES-CBC encryption mode.

Our player is capable of <1 second latency behind the live edge.

We also enable managed latency by defining a live edge latency goal to synchronize all players instances for similar playback timing. For example: a football game where all users see a goal at the same time by accounting for playback drift.

Enable stream downloading for secure local offline playback. Manifests can be accessed to transfer content to a user’s device with the video quality, audio, and subtitle track able to be specified. Content is downloaded with no transmuxing or transcoding to maintain video quality. DRM licenses are also stored securely: both during download and on a user’s device, your content remains protected.

We support two trickplay modes:

Decoder mode: Speed up playback by downloading and showing all frames. This creates a smooth experience, but isn’t ideal at high speeds due to decoder/bandwidth limitations. You can’t rewind with this mode.

Seek mode: Our player continuously seeks, forward or backwards, based on the playback speed. This mode performs better at high speeds (> 6x) since you only need one frame at given time intervals. I-frame tracks are typically used here to reduce segment sizes and allow faster seeking.

Examples: Background loading, service integration, playing content when device screen is off, or playing content when another app has focus.

Perform automatic catch up whenever the player position falls behind a certain limit. This is useful to closely follow the live edge or to avoid falling behind the live window. Catching up is accomplished by either speeding-up playback or seeking to the live edge.

Software-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for improved security on devices without hardware-protection. Includes detection for debugging, swizzling, and jailbreaking.

Prevent user access to streams by denying licensing and license renewal requests. This controls how many streams can be accessed simultaneously by a given user, for example, to enable ‘limited device number’ business models.

This is useful, for example, in rental use-cases where a license will expire and requires renewal while a user is watching content. Our player renews and installs licenses automatically ahead of time so users experience uninterrupted streams.

For example: enable a 1 week license time-frame to watch a 120 minute content title. License expires either after 1 week or after 120 minutes of viewing.

The USA FCC requires that players must include the ability for users to set subtitle parameters such as font, font size, color, etc. We provide an API to easily configure these settings as well as a user preview.

Sideloading allows you to add additional URLs as subtitle tracks. This means you can add subtitles without embedding the track into your manifest. For example, if you receive subtitles for content and they aren’t part of the manifest, you can sideload them for use without having to re-create your manifest.

When playing content with VideoToolbox you can define a callback to intercept the audio samples and chain them to your own audio processing queue.

If you’d like to avoid VMAP, you can use our API to manually set when ads are played within the playback timeline.