dasher

Easily create an MPEG-DASH presentation of a video.

Why use dasher

ffmpeg and the Bento4 SDK, in themselves, are very powerful tools and in combination, can be used to create high-quality, highly viable streaming media. However, they are quite daunting to use for the not-so-well-versed.

dasher is a tool intended to make it easy to create streaming media.

Features

• Easy conversion of unfragmented video to an MPEG-DASH compatible format.
• Adaptive streaming implemented by automatically transcoding video to different resolutions to obtain a number of user-specified streams.
• Efficient encoding using ffmpeg's open-source H.264 (x264) encoder.
• Encoder settings optimized for 1080p input to deliver quality similar to Amazon's VBR H.264 streams, encoded using successively decreasing CRF values to maintain a perceptible level of quality across resolutions.

Dependencies

• Requires Python 3.7+ to be installed
• ffmpeg
• Bento4

The source files need to be placed in the same directory as the Bento4 and ffmpeg binaries.

Usage

Place the files adaptive_streamer.py and dasher.py in the same directory as the Bento4 and ffmpeg binaries and run the script using:

python3 dasher.py <input file> <number_of_streams>

For example:

python3 dasher.py input.mp4 5

will take input.mp4 as input and create an MPEG-DASH manifest stream.mpd in the directory output with 5 streams of successively decreasing resolution.

A 1080p (1920x1080) file with 5 output streams will generate the manifest output\stream.mpd with resoultions:

1920x1080, 1280x720, 960x540, 768x432, and 640x360

The audio stream (if any) will be copied from the input.