I’m studying video streaming and, in particular, two ways to stream videos: progressive download and adaptive HTTP streaming. I started to use jwplayer 6.12 (free edition), embedding it in a web application, deployed in apache tomcat 7.0.54, and I see that it is possible to manually switch quality, as shown here:
http://support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/articles/1428524-hd-quality-toggling
I think in this case I’m using progressive download (is it right?). However, I don’t understand why, when I change quality, playback doesn’t restart from the beginning. I tested also my application using an android device with google chrome and firefox browsers. When I changed quality playback restarted in firefox but not in google chrome. Could someone please explain me why, in general, when changing quality, playback doesn’t restart and why it restarts in firefox for android ? Why using adaptive HTTP streaming then?
Playback shouldn't restart from the beginning when you switch quality. I think it's not working correctly on Firefox. The player must keep track of view time to ensure a seamless transition, so a restart is not the desired behavior.
Using HTTP Live Streaming has the advantage that the quality of the stream will switch automatically based on the network conditions.
With progressive download you cannot do live streaming, you need to have the whole file available from the start.