Producing dash streming using ffmpeg and bento4

Dash is the open-source equivalent of Apple's HLS technology, used for the same purpose: to deliver live videos or on-demand videos over the web, dynamically changing the quality based on the internet connection of the final user.

Following formula will produce a multi-bit-rate version of our master with h264 constrained encoding

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v h264 -crf 22 -tune film -profile:v main -level:v 4.0 -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 10000k -r 25 -keyint_min 25 -g 50 -sc_threshold 0 -c:a aac -ar 44100 -b:a 128k -ac 2 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart 1080.mp4 -s 1280x720 -c:v h264 -crf 24 -tune film -profile:v main -level:v 4.0 -maxrate 2500k -bufsize 5000k -r 25 -keyint_min 25 -g 50 -sc_threshold 0 -c:a aac -ar 44100 -b:a 128k -ac 2 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart 720.mp4 -s 854x480 -c:v h264 -crf 30 -tune film -profile:v main -level:v 4.0 -maxrate 1250k -bufsize 2500k -r 25 -keyint_min 25 -g 50 -sc_threshold 0 -c:a aac -ar 44100 -b:a 96k -ac 2 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart 480.mp4 -s 640x360 -c:v h264 -crf 33 -tune film -profile:v main -level:v 4.0 -maxrate 900k -bufsize 1800k -r 25 -keyint_min 25 -g 50 -sc_threshold 0 -c:a aac -ar 44100 -b:a 96k -ac 2 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart 360.mp4 -s 320x24 -c:v h264 -crf 36 -tune film -profile:v main -level:v 4.0 -maxrate 625k -bufsize 1250k -r 25 -keyint_min 25 -g 50 -sc_threshold 0 -c:a aac -ar 22050 -b:a 64k -ac 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart 240.mp4

All tags described in my previous blog

Create multi-bitrate DASH playlist with Bento4

In order to create a multi-bitrate DASH playlist with Bent04, we need to perform 2 separate action.

• First one dedicated at the fragmentation of each file(version) of our master video, mp4fragment command will responsible for this task

Sample command:

mp4fragment 1080.mp4 1080-f.mp4

mp4fragment: this will launch Bento4's Mp4 Fragment tool
1080.mp4: this is the input file to be fragmented
1080-f.mp4: this is an example output's filename

Now we have to repeat this command for each version of our master video

mp4fragment 1080.mp4 1080-f.mp4&&mp4fragment 720.mp4 720-f.mp4&&mp4fragment 480.mp4 480-f-.mp4&&mp4fragment 360.mp4 360-f.mp4&&mp4fragment 240.mp4 240-f.mp4

Generate DASH playlist

In order to generate a DASH playlist with our segmented mp4s, we will use another tool from Bento4 called mp4dash using following command:

mp4dash 240-f.mp4 360-f.mp4 480-f.mp4 720-f.mp4 1080-f.mp4

This will generate a folder titled "output" which will
contain 2 separate folders: one called "audio" dedicated for the audio streaming and another called "video" containing the segments of each of the 5 variations of our master video. And finally we will find the "stream.mpd" file which is the DASH playlist itself.