MP4 tracks support for HLS and MPEG-DASH VOD

Nimble Streamer has a rich HLS VOD and MPEG-DASH VOD feature sets which allows streaming HLS and DASH from media files of various formats. When streaming VOD from MP4, you may need to specify an exact video and/or audio track to use for playback. This is very useful for several cases, e.g. when a user wants to get content for his or her native language.

So Nimble Streamer now supports tracks selection for HLS and DASH VOD playback. The default parameters name for accessing tracks are "nimble_video_index" and "nimble_audio_index".
E.g. you may call different tracks like that:

http://127.0.0.1:8081/vod/multilang_sample.mp4/playlist.m3u8?nimble_audio_index=2
http://127.0.0.1:8081/vod/multilang_sample.mp4/manifest.mpd?nimble_video_index=1

If you need to use other parameters' name, please you may change them via Nimble configuration file. These parameters are set like this:

nimble_video_index = <name for video>
nimble_audio_index = <name for audio>

E.g.

nimble_audio_index = audioIndex

In case of changes, your URL will look like this:

• http://127.0.0.1:8081/vod/multilang_sample.mp4/playlist.m3u8?audioIndex=2
• http://127.0.0.1:8081/vod/multilang_sample.mp4/manifest.mpd?audioIndex=2

Please read Nimble Streamer configuration file description to see how you can make changes and what other config parameters may be useful for you. The VOD caching parameters might be extremely helpful for any VOD streamer.

If you use SMIL files for creating ABR HLS VOD streams, please read this article to learn about using tracks indices there. To see tracks selection example for MPEG-DASH VOD ABR, read this article.

Also check audio-only and video-only transmuxing via SMIL.

If you have further questions about this or any other feature, just let us know.

Related documentation

Nimble Streamer, Nimble Streamer configuration, HLS VOD streaming, MPEG-DASH VOD streaming, MPEG-DASH VOD, ABR VOD for HLS via SMIL, ABR VOD for MPEG-DASH via SMIL