#low-latency
2 articles
01
·Media in Production·FREE·10 min read
HLS and DASH — How Video Actually Reaches You
Streamed video does not flow — a player downloads small files a few seconds long, one after another. What segments and manifests really are, the arithmetic behind how a player picks a rendition, where latency comes from, how low-latency modes cheat it, and why none of it works without a CDN.
02
·Audio Codecs·★ MEMBER·PAPER·11 min read
Why Opus Won — The Design of a Modern Audio Codec
Audio codecs used to split cleanly into speech codecs and music codecs. Opus ended the split by stacking two engines, SILK and CELT, inside a single bitstream. This piece works up from zero: how linear prediction and the MDCT divide the spectrum between them, why CELT refuses to let band energy collapse, what actually sets a codec's latency, and the technical and institutional reasons Opus became WebRTC's mandatory codec.