Programmable Media release notes: November 13, 2023

Cloudinary Programmable Media release notes are published periodically and give you a quick overview of all the new features, enhancements, and fixes that have been recently released for Cloudinary developers. When relevant, they may also give sneak previews of upcoming features and/or other important announcements.

New features

CMAF and DASH support for automatic streaming profile selection

Automatic streaming profile selection now uses CMAF and adds DASH support (in addition to the already supported HLS).

CMAF (Common Media Application Format), is an important standard in the world of streaming media, particularly for video content delivery, and offers cost savings through reduced encoding, storage, and delivery expenses in addition to increased interoperability, by delivering a single set of derived media that is compatible across devices and browsers.

To request automatic streaming with DASH, add the .mpd extension together with the sp_auto transformation:

Benefits of DASH include:

• Codec-agnostic (allows the choice of the most efficient and suitable codec for the content e.g. VP9, AV1 - currently only H.264 is supported).
  
• Vendor-neutral (open standards developed by the industry consortium MPEG).
• Highly efficient in adjusting the video quality in real-time based on the viewer’s network conditions and device capabilities.
• Future-proof (supports higher resolutions, and better compression codecs and techniques).

Learn more about DASH: What Is MPEG-DASH? And MPEG-DASH vs. HLS

Points to consider:

• When requesting either HLS or DASH streams, both variations will be generated and made available concurrently, thanks to the use of CMAF.
• Automatic streaming profile selection on-the-fly operates exclusively for HLS (.m3u8) and supports output requests of up to 60 minutes.
• For DASH (.mpd) or videos longer than 60 minutes, it is queued for background processing.

Future plans:

• Additional format support - H.265, VP9, and AV1.
• Video/audio stream separation.

Learn more: Automatic streaming profile selection

Video Player for Flutter SDK

A new version (1.1.0) of the Flutter SDK is now available with a native Flutter video player, which supports Cloudinary features out of the box.

The new Flutter video player includes:

• Easy Cloudinary integration for your public IDs and transformations.
• Automatic streaming profile selection by default (unless other transformations are added).

Learn more: Cloudinary native video player

Enhancements

Increased file upload limit to 100 GB

We've added functionality to make it possible to upload files as large as 100 GB to your product environment. To enable this on your account, raise a support request.

To upload large files (above 20 GB), you must use one of the Cloudinary SDKs and set the async parameter to true on upload.

You can see your current usage limits in your Console Account Settings.

Learn more: Uploading large files

Improvements to the Video Analytics dashboard

If you head over to your Video Analytics dashboard, you'll spot some improvements to the metrics breakdown section.

With smaller and more user-friendly cards in a grid layout, improved scrolling, and pie charts replaced with bar charts, we've improved the visual clarity of the metrics.

Learn more: Cloudinary Video Analytics

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