HLS with AES 128 encryption on Android (Ice Cream Sandwich)

Question

I am starting to put an App together that will require the use of HLS video. I want to use Ice Cream sandwich as the target SDK, but I am not certain if this api will support H

Answer 1

As far as I know Http Live Streaming will be supported throught html5 <video> tag, because Adobre Flash for Android is deprecated: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/no-flash-for-android-4-1-jelly-bean-users/11433 And html5 media encryption for Digital Rights Management is still under the form of discussion http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html

Answer 2

In general ICS does support AES-128 encryption according to the HLS standard (see here). However, the media-playback capabilities of a device not dependent on the Android version, but on the media-framework implemented on the particular device. Most phones and tablet use the stagefright media-framework, introduced in Android 2.2. So far I have not seen or heard of any ICS using stagefright where encrypted HLS did not work. However I have, tried seen ICS Set-Top-Boxes using other media-frameworks not capable of playing encrypted HLS (new firmware will probably fix this).

To sum up: understanding is that all ICS are intended to support encrypted HLS, if a particular device is not, a fix is probably on the way. The reason is that without flash, encrypted HLS is the only possible way of achieving DRM for live streaming.