Video Stream Cropping for MPEG-DASH and HLS

Having advanced features such as cropping (changing the size of the video) available with MPEG-DASH and HLS, through a unified API with API clients for different languages can be very handy

Streaming has become more complex in the last few years, with modern technologies such as MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) and Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). But it’s worth it! Improving the quality of the user experience is paramount, as shown in one of our recent blog posts about video quality and user problems. Having advanced features such as cropping (changing the size of the video) available with MPEG-DASH and HLS, through a unified API with API clients for different languages can be very handy. Our team implemented this feature and it can be used in a very simple but effective way with our encoding profiles.

Cropping

The cropping configuration is part of the encoding profile and can be found in our developer section. It contains the parameters, top, bottom, right and left. These parameters specify how much pixels of the input video will be cropped on each side. You can use theses features to cut off black bars, to implement zoom effects or to just select a specific part of the video that is important.

"croppingConfig": {
    "top": 100,
    "bottom": 100,
    "right": 5,
    "left": 5
}

Zoom Effect with Cropping

Our python API client contains an example that implements a zoom effect on the Sintel movie. On the left side you can see the original movie while on the right side you can see a cropped version of the video which looks like a zoomed-in version.

Crop your Video Streams with Bitmovin for Free

If you want to crop your MPEG-DASH and HLS content you can use the Bitmovin encoding service that offers a free plan with 2.5GB encoding output per month. That’s great for testing and playing around with our cropping feature. If you are missing something in our cropping feature, just drop us a line. We are always interested in your feedback, which helps us to improve our service.