Terms and definitions

Overview

As the RxPlayer manages multiple type of streaming technologies, which can use their own definition and terminology, we had to find a compromise and use our own terminology, which try to take the best from these.

We here define various terms used in the documentation which might not be obvious right along.

Definitions

Adaptation

Simply put, what we call an “Adaptation” is just an audio, video or text track.

More technically, it is an element of a Period (and by extension of the Manifest) which represents a single type of media.

An adaptation can be for example any of those things:

A video track
A french audio track
An italian text track
A thumbnail track
…

Many Streaming Technology have this concept even though their name can change, an Adaptation is equivalent to:

DASH’s AdaptationSet
Microsoft Smooth Streaming’s StreamIndex

Note: There is minor differences between the RxPlayer’s Adaptation and DASH’ AdaptationSet. Namely multiple AdaptationSets can be merged into a single Adaptation in very specific cases. You can find more infos on it here.

Bitrate

In the RxPlayer, a bitrate of a Representation indicates the number of bits per second of content described by that Representation.

For example, let’s imagine a video Adaptation with two Representation:

one with a bitrate at 1,000,000 (which is 1 Megabit)
the other with a bitrate at 500,000 (which is 500 kilobits)

Each seconds of content described by the first Representation will be represented by 1 megabit of data

Each seconds for the second Representation will be represented by 500 kilobits.

Both will represent the same data, but the first one will need that the RxPlayer fetch more data to show the same amount of content.

In most cases, a higher bitrate means a higher quality. That’s why the RxPlayer has to compromise between having the best quality and choosing a Representation having a low-enough bitrate to be able to play on the user’s computer without needing to pause due to poor network conditions.

Buffer

When we talk about the “buffer” in the RxPlayer, it most likely mean one of two things, depending on the context:

The media data currently loaded by the browser, ready to be decoded.

In the API, that’s what we mean when we talk about the buffer.
modules in the RxPlayer downloading media segments and doing what is needed to play them.

Here you will mostly encounter that term in the architecture documentation.

Buffer type

RxPlayer’s buffer types describe a single “type” of media.

Example of such types are:

“video”: which represents only the video content
“audio”: the audio content without the video
“text”: the subtitles, for example

Those are called buffer types here (or simply “types”) as each type will have its own Buffer (in both sense of the term) in the RxPlayer.

Chunk

Depending on the context, a chunk can be either a sub-part of a Media Segment or the Media segment itself.

Initialization segment

An initialization segment is a specific type of media segment, which includes metadata necessary to initialize the browser’s internal decoder.

Those are sometimes needed before we can actually begin to push any “real” media segment from the corresponding Representation.

As such, when one is needed, the initialization segment is the first segment downloaded for a given Representation.

Manifest

The Manifest is the generic name for the document which describes the content you want to play.

This is equivalent to the DASH’s Media Presentation Description (or MPD), the Microsoft Smooth Streaming’s Manifest and the HLS’ Master Playlist.

Such document can describe for example:

multiple qualities for the same video or audio tracks
multiple audio tracks in different languages
presence of subtitles

Note that this concept is only used in Streaming technologies. You won’t interact with a Manifest if you’re directly playing a MP4 or webM file.

Media segment

A media segment (or simply segment), is a small chunk of media data.

In many streaming technologies, a content is separated into multiple chunks of small duration (usually between 2 and 10 seconds).

This allows, for reasons to long to detail here, to easily implements many features:

live streaming,
language switching
adaptive streaming

When you play a content with the RxPlayer, it will most of the time download media segments of different types (audio, video, text…) progressively rather than the whole content at a single time.

Period

Simply put, a Period defines what the content will be from a starting time to an ending time. It is an element contained in the Manifest) and it will contain the Adaptations available for the corresponding time period.

Depending on the transport used, they correspond to different concepts:

for DASH contents, it is more or less the same thing than an MPD’s <Period> element
for “local” contents, it corresponds to a single object from the periods array.
for “MetaPlaylist” contents, it corresponds to all the Period elements we retrieved after parsing the corresponding Manifest from the elements of the contents array.
any other transport will have a single Period, describing the whole content.

–

As an example, let’s take a manifest describing a live content with chronologically:

an english TV Show
an old italian film with subtitles
an American blockbuster with closed captions.

Let’s say that those sub-contents are drastically different:

they are all in different languages
the american blockbuster has more available video bitrates than the old italian one

Because the available tracks and available qualities are different from sub-content to sub-content, we cannot just give a single list of Adaptations valid for all of them. They have to be in some way separated in the Manifest object.

That’s a case where Periods will be used. Here is a visual representation of how the Periods would be divided here:

        Period 1                Period 2                Period 3
08h05              09h00                       10h30                 now
  |==================|===========================|====================|
        TV Show               Italian Film        American Blockbuster

Each of these Periods will be linked to different audio, video and text Adaptations, themselves linked to different Representations.

Representation

A Representation is an element of an Adaptation, and by extension of the Manifest) that describes an interchangeable way to represent the parent Adaptation.

For example, a video Adaptation can have several Representations, each having its own bitrate, its own width or its own height. The idea behind a Representation is that it can be changed by any other one in the same Adaptation as the content plays.

This is most often implemented to allow multiple bitrates for the same Adaptation, to be more flexible to poor network (low bandwidth) or computing (slow computer) conditions.

A Representation has its equivalent in multiple Streaming technologies. It is roughly the same as:

DASH’s Representation
Microsoft Smooth Streaming’s QualityIndex
HLS’ variant (the notion of variant is actually a little more complex, so here it’s not an exact comparison)