Media Fragments Lab

Notes on segmented media delivery and stream testing.

This is a small internal notebook about HTTP-based media delivery: how fragments are chunked, how buffers are sized, and how players recover when a segment arrives late.

Buffer sizing

A player that buffers two seconds of video will stall on any jitter longer than two seconds. Most of what looks like "bad network" is a buffer that was sized for a different bitrate.

Fragment boundaries

• Segment on keyframes, not on fixed byte counts.
• Keep segment duration stable – variable duration breaks adaptive logic.
• Prefetch the next fragment before the current one drains.

Latency

Low-latency delivery is mostly about removing round trips, not about compressing harder. Every extra handshake is a full RTT added to startup.