Controlling Video Quality

HLS players, by default will fetch the lowest quality before fetching higher quality. If you know your customers have higher bandwdith, or you’d like to serve more premium content, we give some configuration.

You can choose to set a minimum quality for a given video with these URL parameters:

With the corresponding parameter name meaning these “short edge” resolutions

So, this URL will play a video starting with hd, but can drop down to sd if needed:

[...truncated]/master.m3u8?min-quality=sd&max-quality=hd&start-quality=hd

Controlling Quality With Edge IDs Automatically

Edge IDs allow you to set defaults for playback quality. Create your Edge IDs and pass through arguments for min-quality, max-quality or start-quality to handle this automatically.

So, for example if you want to offer lower-tier subscribers hd and higher tier subscribers 4k, the best pattern would be to create two Edge IDs. One with a cap on quality, and one without a cap.