[Terretta]

Well done! This is a great breakdown and explanation.

Nearly two decades ago, we shifted from other formats such as WindowsMedia -- that had great multi-bitrate support built in -- to H.264 over HLS not just so we could serve over traditional http CDNs at scale instead of needing media servers, but so we could do a host of features enabled by splicing on the fly. We used extremely similar techniques to enable not just live switching among bitrates of live feeds from live events, but similar adaptive bandwidth playback for VOD as well. And of course, dynamic ad insertion (even tailored to audiences) into a stream in place of the blank a broadcaster sends, without ad support (or ad blocking) in the player. It's interesting this still isn't the norm.

Very cool to see how this works unpacked again, and very cool for Plex to have a challenger!