Twitter supports 4k 60fps video uploads!
Here's how to do it 🧵
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Step 1:
Package your media file in the standard MPEG-DASH streaming format. You may need to tweak your encoder settings to make sure that the fragment size doesn't go above 5MB.
ffmpeg and Bento4 are the only tools you need. Use mp4dash's "-use-segment-list" option.
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Step 2:
Add dummy PNG headers to each of the DASH fragments. Adjust the "mediaRange" attributes in the MPD manifest to account for the added bytes, so that the resulting data is still a valid DASH stream.
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Step 3:
Upload your PNG/DASH polyglot files to Twitter. I suggest posting to a private Community, so as not to spam your own feed.
Update the manifest to point at the image files on the Twitter CDN, and publish the manifest somewhere.
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Step 4:
View your media!
You can use any standard MPEG-DASH player, e.g. via your web browser:
reference.dashif.org/dash.js/latest (unfortunately Chrome-only, due to CORS issues)
If you don't believe that this is really streaming from Twitter, check the network tab in dev tools!
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Here's the direct manifest URL, in case you want to try watching in another media player like VLC (it even works on the iOS VLC app)
https://www.da.vidbuchanan .co.uk/cors/twitter_bbb_4k.mpd
(remove the space in the URL)
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This works because:
a) Twitter doesn't recompress PNG images that meet certain constraints
b) The DASH format is very flexible, supporting ranged requests.
c) Twitter's CDN has a very permissive CORS policy (unfortunately not quite permissive enough to work in Firefox, though)
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Alternate web-based player URL: shaka-player-demo.appspot.com/demo/#audiolan (still chrome-only, unfortunately)
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P.S. you have to click the blue "load" button, to get the other demo link to actually play
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Some fun stats:
The stream linked above is about 10 minutes long, and made up of exactly 140 different PNGs, totaling over 600MB of storage!
It took me about an hour to upload them all by hand, lol.
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