IRT, based in Munich and which supports AV technology for public broadcasters in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) said that it has demonstrated a new video format, the Common Media Application Format (CMAF). CMAF is intended to unify the two leading adaptive streaming standards which are MPEG-DASH and Apple’s HLS. With CMAF, both HLS playlists and DASH manifests are allowed to reference the same fragmented MP4 (fMP4) chunks, whereas currently these chunks must be duplicated for each streaming mechanism. That means that any Dash player, based on Windows or Android, can play the same streams as Apple devices (iOS10, tvOS, MacOS).
IRT said that smart TVs based on HbbTV 1.5 and onwards support DASH-based streaming; therefore, CMAF also provides an important step towards the harmonisation of HbbTV and HLS platforms. Broadcasters have the advantage that a single stream can be used.
IRT has made the streams available online at http://subtitling.irt.de/cmaf/
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