At 13:57 +0200 9/06/09, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
I find this draft to be quite annoying. It doesn't have anything to do with HTTP or live, or really even streaming -- the title is just from the marketing term that Apple has chosen to describe this concept in general. What the draft defines is a set of media type extensions to the unregistered "audio/x-mpegurl" media type (M3U Playlist format) that provide additional information for an indirect request of a stream via sequential requests on the listed URIs. While I think that might be a fine idea, it should start by registering the media type being extended, and the title/introduction should reflect what the document defines so that the right people will review it prior to publication. I don't like it when the IETF is abused for marketing purposes.
Roy, I'm sorry that is what you feel we are doing. We thought we were trying to be as open as possible by providing this for information and criticism. We're not trying to standardize it. I don't think we 'own' the MIME type, so even though it's a concern it's unregistered, it's not clear it's for us to fix, is it?
The draft covers the delivery of live multimedia information which can be essentially indefinite in duration - a stream in common parlance - using HTTP. Given that the content is live and it's an indefinite stream being delivered, and we use HTTP, I don't think the title is very far off base, if at all.
There have been glimpses of a general debate over how to deliver multimedia, here in the AVT list. There are the upcoming MPEG and DVB workshops, where that debate will also continue. We're not the only ones to have tried the 'proper' protocols and found that, after many years, there are infrastructure problems with them. We even open-source a streaming server, and (at one point at least) had sample code for a proxy, iirc, to try to help them along.
-- David Singer Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.