Amazon Vinyl
Amazon Vinyl is an HTML5 playback engine for Dash and HLS streaming. It features high stability, performance, bundle size, compatibility, and standards compliance.
Performance
Amazon Vinyl is designed with a strong focus on performance, leveraging advanced techniques to deliver a seamless user experience. It supports network prioritization, ensuring that critical data is delivered first for uninterrupted playback. Just-in-time buffering allows Amazon Vinyl to efficiently manage resources by decoding data only when needed, minimizing delays. The custom sub-millisecond SAX DASH parser enables lightning-fast processing of media streams, further reducing initial playback delay. Additionally, Amazon Vinyl’s track preloading feature allows applications to anticipate user actions, loading tracks in advance to eliminate any lag or buffering during transitions, resulting in smooth, responsive audio playback.
Footprint
Amazon Vinyl takes an opinionated, zero-runtime-dependency stance. By shedding any dependent frameworks or libraries, Amazon Vinyl bundles at 200 KiB (75 KiB gzipped), making it 50-90% smaller than alternatives, which improves performance, compatibility, and project longevity. Provided configuration can be tuned to optimize for low-memory or variable network-devices.
Premium Quality
Amazon Vinyl supports ultra-high-definition audio for exceptional sound quality even on devices with limited memory resources. It achieves this by efficiently managing data, allowing it to work within small source buffer quotas. This means that, despite the high demands of processing detailed audio files, the engine can still deliver crystal-clear sound without overwhelming the device's memory, making high-fidelity audio accessible to a broader range of devices.
Compatibility
To ensure high compatibility across various devices and browsers, integration tests are run on BrowserStack, a cloud-based testing platform. This allows developers to simulate real-world conditions by testing the application on multiple operating systems, browsers, and devices. By identifying and fixing issues in this diverse environment, the platform guarantees that the application works seamlessly for all users, regardless of their chosen device or browser, leading to a more reliable and consistent user experience.
Amazon Vinyl NPM bundles contain ES5 and ES6 versions, compatible across 99.9% of browsers.
Amazon Vinyl currently supports Widevine (Chrome/Firefox), FairPlay (all iOS browsers, or Safari macOS), and PlayReady (Edge).
| Browser | Support |
|---|---|
| Google Chrome | v52+ |
| Mozilla Firefox | v52+ |
| Safari | HLS v11+, Dash v17+ |
| Microsoft Edge | v18+ |
| Chromium (Opera, Brave) | v52+ |
Amazon Vinyl supports Dash and HLS (fMP4) streaming via MSE on all browsers listed above. Native HLS via FairPlay is supported on Safari and iOS.
Extensibility
Extensibility is a key feature of the system, achieved through the use of dependency injection and support for adding custom track types. Dependency injection allows developers to easily swap out components or services, making the system more flexible and adaptable to different needs. Additionally, the ability to add custom track types enables developers to extend the functionality of the playback engine, allowing it to support new service providers, audio formats or specialized processing workflows.
Getting Started
For installation instructions and detailed API documentation, see the Usage Guide or visit amazonmusic.github.io/vinyl.
Security
See CONTRIBUTING for more information.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING for more information.
License
This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.
