v3.10.2

Release v3.10.2 (2019-01-08)

Overview

This release mainly fixes two issues:

• One in our manifest refreshing logic that prevented some MPDs/Manifests to be refreshed.
  To be exact (and technical), this issue mainly impacted DASH dynamic content in a SegmentTimeline indexing scheme without SegmentTemplate.

  As it is not the first time we had an issue in this area of the code, and as it is sensitive enough, we also decided to double our efforts on unit testing.

• The second, that we tried to fix already in the v3.10.1 release is a better workaround to an Edge/Playready issue with initialization data: Some contents with DRMs could not be played on the Edge Browser.

Manifest-refreshing bug

Some Manifests were never refreshed (mainly DASH contents, but also Smooth ones in some specific use-cases) due to an unfortunate mix-up made in the v3.10.1 release.

We also improved on the interval at which some DASH MPD were refreshed. It should now happen less often.

DRM issue on Edge

The work-around we brought to a IE11/Edge issue with encrypted contents in the v3.10.1 did not seem to provide good enough results with our test contents.

We now adopted another strategy, which is to move CENC PSSH boxes at the end of the initialization data.

Simply put:

• previously we made two tries on IE11/Edge: one with the problematic data, the second without (only called if the first failed)
• now we directly put the problematic data at the end on the first try

This new method provided better results with our test contents. Do not hesitate to open an issue if you still experience KEY_GENERATE_ERROR errors with encrypted contents on IE11/Edge.

Jest and unit testing

To limit regressions like the one we fixed in this release, we decided to put more and more of our time on tests.

Multiple months ago, we reinforced our end-to-end tests which automatically launch contents, perform some manipulation on them (change the speed, seek everywhere) and check that everything is ok.

If those tests definitely helps us to ship new releases confidently, we still had specific areas of our code that was vulnerable. One of those was live contents, for which end-to-end tests are difficult to write as those evolve over time.

For those issues, we tried to implement a reliable unit testing strategy for the v3.10.1. However, we went into multiple problems: the tools we used at the time were not adapted. After taking different paths, we decided to rely on Jest running in a Node.js environment for our unit tests.

This choice was mainly motivated by the fact that it was the less troublesome tool to use with our specific situation (TypeScript code + TypeScript tests, globally defined variables, coverage reports, high necessity of dependency injection).

We're now happy to announce that the unit test coverage of our code went just from a (minuscule) 13% in the v3.10.1 to a (less minuscule) 22% in the v3.10.2, and that only in a few days! We concentrated our efforts on sensitive parts of our codebase for now but we definitely want to approach as much as possible 100%.

For now however, at least 10% more coverage for each release seems to be a doable objective.

Changelog

Bug fixes

• dash/smooth: fix manifest updates for some DASH contents (SegmentTimeline without SegmentTemplate) and for some Smooth usages
• compat/drm: adopt a new strategy for malfunctioning CENC PSSH on Edge by moving them at the end of the initialization data
• dash/smooth: update deprecated Manifest.adaptations property when updating the manifest

Other improvements

• dash: refresh the MPD less often
• dash/smooth: improve precision of getMaximumPosition when the Manifest is updated
• tests: use the Jest library for unit tests
• tests: add a lot of unit tests to sensitive code (from a coverage of 13% in the v3.10.1 to 22% in the v3.10.2)
• npm: reduce size of the npm package