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mkammes
Roku Guru

HLS best practices when using UHD + HD content?

I thought I'd do a check-in and see what folks are doing for building their HLS playlists.

Referring to: https://developer.roku.com/docs/specs/media/streaming-specifications.md , UHD encoded material can only be achieved via HEVC/h.265. This means to maximize compatibility, I'd need to encode UHD as HEVC, but perhaps I could do FHD and smaller as h.264.  This isn't possible in the same manifest file as all of the chunks would need to be fragmented mp4s, which Roku doesn't support for HLS (all media chunks must be TS).

So, are folks:

1. Building 2 manifest files (one for h.264, one for h.265) and double the media (h.264 and h.265 variants) and letting the player sniff out the right version.

2. Forget the UHD version and stick with FHD (and smaller) resolutions.

3. Encoding everything as HEVC/h.265 and eliminating compatibility on older units.

Thanks for the feedback!

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