Content Preparation
Preparing your media for OTT is important to enable efficient delivery and a good end-user experience.
Also, it is key for processing your content later for purposes like archiving, clipping and replay.
Having source content correctly formatted will make the processing by Unified Packager and Unified Origin easier and improve performance.
Note
This section is about the format of the content at the media source. For dynamic delivery of VOD or Live, Unified Origin will repackage this source on-the-fly (i.e., 'just-in-time') for delivery in the requested output format (to support different end user devices). For static delivery of VOD, this source may be repackaged with Unified Packager into the intended delivery format.
First content check
Before using the Validator as outlined below please make sure your content complies with the following requirements (please note the Validator will check for these in the future):
- Must Fix: alignment of Groups of Pictures (GOPs) across bitrates
- Should Fix: fragment boundaries are aligned across all tracks (audio, video, text)
- Must Fix: subtitle cues follow a sequential timeline aligned with other tracks
- Should Fix: in case of B-frames, use negative composition time offsets (and no edit lists)
Validator content check
Before looking at User experience content check it is very much recommended as a best practice to first make sure your content passes the Validator best practice suite:
The result of a validation pass will look like the following, highlighting in green what is correct and in red what is not:
Please follow the quickstart guide to get started.
Next to the best-practice suite the following other test suites are available:
CMAF Formatting
Timed Text Formatting
Timed Metadata
Please follow these when you are using CMAF, Timed Text or Timed Metadata.
User experience content check
- Must Fix: a suitable bitrate ladder (content dependent)
- Should Fix: all tracks are compliant with a CMAF media profile
- Should Fix: timed metadata is carried in a separate sparse track
- Should Fix: add captions or subtitles
- Should Fix: add an audio description track (for the visually impaired)
- Should Fix:: avoid transcoding of subtitles when using advanced styling