TVSDK 2.4.1 for Android Release Notes tvsdk-for-android-release-notes

HLS version 4 features

• Video playback (play, pause, seek) with player control for live, linear, and VOD streams.
• Closed captioning. TVSDK can display 608/708 closed captions with a selection of fonts, font sizes, colors, and background. It can also support videos with roll-up captions and switch between language tracks if those are available.
• Trick play mode supports fast forward and rewind for HLS streams that use I-Frames. All video playback controls function on the content. Slow motion (forward) is available for external video playback mode with rates between 0 and 1.
• Adaptive bitrate (ABR) lets the player dynamically select which of multiple versions of the same content stream to play, based on network and other conditions. You can set parameters dynamically or in the manifest file to select among aggressive, moderate, and conservative selection policies.
• Byte ranges enable a single TS file to contain multiple TS segments.
• Alternate audio renditions enable the player to switch between available audio tracks.
• ID3 support. TVSDK can play HLS audio and video streams that contain ID3 audio metadata, such as artist name, title, and album.
• **Failover. **TVSDK uses strategies to continue uninterrupted playback, despite failures of host servers, playlist files, and segments.
• Multi-channel audio pass-through (DD+). TVSDK can pass Dolby Digital Plus audio (E-AC3) data to supporting hardware.

Content protection features

• DRM for HLS. All video playback APIs work with encrypted video content protected by Adobe Access. The following DRM features are supported:

  • License rotation
  • Key rotation
  • License caching
  • Policy time
  • IV rotation

AES 128 Playback. TVSDK can play advanced encryption standard (AES) HLS content with key size of 128 bits.

Protected HLS (PHLS) provides a limited set of pre-built DRM policies, a subset of what Adobe Access provides, to enable lightweight DRM over HLS for live and VOD streams.

Advertising/alternate content and monetization features

• Tracking for server-side-inserted ads. TVSDK can track ads inserted by the Adobe Cloud ad insertion service. It supports linear ads in VAST2, VAST3, and VMAP formats for VOD and live/linear streams.
• Custom HLS tags. TVSDK uses its MediaPlayerConfig class to enable notifying the player application when custom HLS tags appear in the stream.
• Client side ad insertion. The Auditude ad insertion library works with Adobe Auditude servers to resolve ads for insertion dynamically into live, linear, and VOD content, at pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll positions.
• Custom ad resolvers. The ContentResolver, OpportunityGenerator, and MediaPlayerClientFactory interfaces enable you to implement a custom ad/alternate content resolver and register a custom opportunity detector to work with TVSDK. The TestAdResolver and AuditudeResolver classes provide C++ examples of implementing a content resolver. You can find a Javascript example at samples/jspsdk/testapp/psdk.js.
• Consistent ad behavior. Use the AdPolicySelector interface to enable consistent behavior across all players for operations like seek and trick play when ads are present in the content. If you don’t implement your own, TVSDK uses DefaultAdPolicySelector.
• Remove/replace C3 ads. Use the appropriate TVSDK API to remove custom content ranges and dynamically insert new ads without additional prep work. This is handy when live/linear content is broadcast, then immediately made available on demand without cleanup.

Instant on for VOD and live When you enable instant on, the TVSDK initializes and buffers media before playback starts. Because you can launch multiple MediaPlayerItemLoader instances simultaneously in the background, you can buffer multiple streams. When a user changes the channel, and the stream has buffered properly, playback on the new channel starts immediately. TVSDK 2.4 also supports the Instant On for live streams also. The live streams are re-buffered when the live window moves.

**Performance Improvements **The new TVSDK 2.4 architecture brings various performance improvements:

• Sub-segmentation - TVSDK further reduces the size of each fragment to start playback as soon as possible.
• Parallel ad downloads - TVSDK prefetches ads in parallel to the content playback before hitting the ad breaks thus enabling seamless playback of ads and content.
• Lazy ad resolution - With this feature, we don’t wait for resolution of non-preroll ads before starting playback, thus decreasing the startup time. APIs like seek and trick-play are still not allowed until all ads are resolved.

MP4 content playback