PRESTOplay SDK for Web Apps

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.

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.

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

CDN rotation: Allow multiple CDN sources to be defined for a single playback session. If the player gets a connectivity error from a CDN, it will quickly switch to the next source in the background to avoid buffering or disruption.

Define sequences of VOD and live content along with pre-caching of the next item for smooth content transitions.

Allows content representation exclusion. Our SDK 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.

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

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.

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.

Extend the reach of your encrypted Smooth Streaming libraries. Content previously packaged specifically for PlayReady can be used with Widevine instead.

We allow PlayReady-protected Smooth Streaming content to playback on-the-fly across Widevine DRM platforms. No server-side changes needed as everything is handled client-side including: PSSH box conversion, video decoder initialization, and dynamic fragment conversion.

The USA FCC requires that players must have the ability to allow users to set subtitle parameters such as font, font size, color, etc. We provide an API to easily configure these settings.

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.

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