Require all video representations in the manifest have a bitrate at least the provided Mbps. This can be used to enforce a minimum level of quality at the expense of users on slower connections.
From this passage, it seems like clientBandwidthHint can be used to filter out the low-resolution streams, allowing you to form a manifest with multiple streams that have bandwidth higher than the provided value
Actual behavior
When clientBandwidthHint is provided the manifest always contains a single stream, even if the requested video is available in higher resolutions than the provided value
This thread describes that very same issue but was closed due to inactivity
Thanks for the hint @sdayman! I will figure out which one is the intended behavior and fix the docs or the implementation (likely the docs).
What’s your use case for clientBandwidthHint? I believe we implemented this feature in order to bypass certain video players’ bad bandwidth estimation algorithms when the app that plays back the video knows exactly what the bandwidth available is. Maybe what you need is a different solution.
Our use case is very much in line with the current documentation: we wanted to use clientBandwidthHint to prevent Apple’s AVPlayer from using some of the low-resolution streams and only have something like 480 or 720 as the lowest possible resolution
There are other similar use cases. When playing back on large screen devices you might want to start with a high resolution rendition (while you wait for the automatic bitrate selection to kick in), and similarly you might have a scenario where starting with a low resolution version is preferred (for example, where you know that users are more likely to be using a low bandwidth connection). You might want the top bitrate renditions removed from a variant manifest, only exposing a “high quality” option through user selection or as a value-add for subscribers. Historically there have been devices which handled adaptive streams very badly, so just giving them a single bitrate to playback was desirable.
My expectation of a “bandwidth hint” is to set the default rendition. In parallel with that, there is probably a need for an upper and lower bound on the renditions returned. Perhaps even named sets of renditions (similar to the variant names for Cloudflare Images).