Get the player bitrate mean value, during a session.

Question

According to http://blog.spooningfork.com/post/44787139787/http-live-streaming-ios-avplayer, the observedBitrate is the bitrate that the player is seeing. However is it an instant value or a mean value ?

the doc says : "The empirical throughput across all media downloaded, in bits per second."

I don't really get this explanation...

Answer 1

The documentation would indicate it is the average.

I take the meaning of throughput across all media downloaded to mean it is averaging the value. If it was the instantaneous bitrate they probably would have named the property currentBitrate.

However, to me it doesn't make much sense to provide the standard derivation of a bitrate for a segment, but not the average bitrate for the segment, so the observedBitrate could be the average bitrate for the segment and the documentation could be wrong.

Comparing the value numberOfBytesTransferred / transferDuration to the observedBitrate might help you on getting to the bottom of your question.