Support for DASH thumbnails

[tykus160]

As RxPlayer currently supports only BIF thumbnails, adding support for images defined in DASH manifest could be beneficial.
From what I see, v4 branch drops all existing logic around images (with BIF as well), so adding thumbnails support could be done in several ways there.
Ideal solution should work efficiently for VOD and live, with single images and grid as well. It should also take existence of thumbnails in several periods into account.

DASH IF spec
Streams to test:

• grid https://dash.akamaized.net/akamai/bbb_30fps/bbb_with_tiled_thumbnails.mpd
• single images https://dash.akamaized.net/akamai/bbb_30fps/bbb_with_multiple_tiled_thumbnails.mpd

[peaBerberian]

Hi @tykus160,

It's definitely something we would would like to integrate.

The removal of image management in the v4 has more to do with how it was implemented in previous versions than for the feature itself. We acted as if it was a supplementary kind of buffer alongside audio, video and text whereas thumbnail previews do not follow the same usage at all (they are most often used as seeking thumbnails with no relation to the current position, to the wantedBufferAhead and so on.).
A better thumbnail API implementation should also allow lazy downloading of thumbnail tiles (e.g. either by doing it on method call or by deporting the downloading logic to the application) as it's more adapted to how DASH tile thumbnail work.

Though we haven't had time to integrate this yet, as this is not a priority for Canal+ or its partners at the moment. We had before enough time to integrate many fun non-priorities, sadly we've been more busy lately.

If you have some draft or some attempt to implement it however, don't hesitate to propose them here.

In the meantime, we'll see when and if we have time to implement this. We're also continuing to advocate for this feature internally :)

[tykus160]

Hey @peaBerberian

Thanks for the quick response and all the context ;)

I did some preliminary work myself on this matter, but it utilizes v3 API for now and I'm doing all fetching & segments-related stuff through deprecated getManifest() API client-side. I didn't dive into deeper integration with RxPlayer due to existing thumbnails logic, which, as you mentioned, is suitable for audio/video/text, but definitely not for images.

Ideally I'd go with a proper implementation for v4, but open question is when it will be released.