KID it out — Putting Big Buck Bunny on a diet
Imagine this: You are coming home after a long day, ready to relax on your couch with a good book or an exciting movie. You are in front of your apartment, you have your key, but you can’t open the door. For some reason, the keyhole is blocked, and you can’t insert the key. Actually, something similar happened to my brother lately. He was coming home at 3 am, and an old tenant of the house had sealed the keyhole. He had to drive back the whole way to crash at a friend’s place. Different story though… In our case, the key is actually a license key, and we need it to decrypt our video. But for some reason, we can’t use this valid key/license.
We all enjoy streaming videos to our TVs. However, as developers, we know the dark side of media streaming. We know how painful it can be to develop applications for embedded devices such as Smart TVs or Set-Top boxes. Quite often something works very well on Desktop browsers but fails on embedded devices. Recently we were facing exactly such a situation. So, let me tell you the story about “Putting Big Buck Bunny on a diet“.
We are at a very busy online bazaar. From one of the merchants, we buy a .zip surprise bag. It contains an ancient manuscript, a dusty device and piece of paper with a token and a URL on it. Our task: Use the device to decrypt and play the content that is described in the manuscript. First, we take a look at the manuscript. It contains some very weird symbols and seems to follow a certain structure. It looks like an XML and… wait, we have seen this before! This looks like a DASH MPD!
