Curtis Jones

Years ago curtisjones.com was for sale for three thousand dollars. Not three thousand dollars of fun. A year or two later, on a whim, I offered a thousand and fully expected to haggle. Ten minutes after they accepted, I was sending the money.

Google closed my ticket: they cannot provide a single working example of their own MPEG-DASH ingest. Go ask StackOverflow. So on to HLS, hand-rolling an M2TS file, and the secret sauce that finally made it work: the audio track was required all along.

SIDX atoms, compatible_brand values, FTYP tweaks, and still that black rectangle. I cannot find evidence anyone has ever made YouTube MPEG-DASH ingest work, so I filed a bug and changed strategy to HLS. To be continued.

A full day merging the audio and video segments from two AVAssetWriters, and the result is a black rectangle YouTube broadcasts and VLC refuses to play. ChatGPT is under heavy load, so I'm out in the cold guessing at sequence numbers and TRUN counts. To be continued.

Progress, of a sort: YouTube now wants exactly one audio stream, and a fixed filename format finally lets my files match. The reward for all this effort is a black rectangle. Still, progress is progress. To be continued.

Part two: I discover AVAssetWriter can write fragmented MP4 after all, so the manual atom-stuffing is off. YouTube's MPEG-DASH ingest remains thoroughly unimpressed, and the search for one missing requirement continues. To be continued.

Has anyone ever actually gotten YouTube's MPEG-DASH live ingest to work? The MPD is accepted, the media is accepted, and the stream never leaves "ready." A descent into ISO BMFF atoms, ChatGPT's Copy code button, and the slow erosion of my dignity.