Introduction

So you have been tasked with developing a media playback application that plays Dolby experiences. You might be wondering what steps you need to go through, and whether there are any pitfalls.

This tutorial will teach you how to write a web application that plays back Dolby Atmos. Along the way, you will learn how to make the playback robust, and how you can cater to different audiences by presenting content in more than one language.

Figure 1. Use cases in developing a media player
figure showing the UI of a media player, with numbered use cases
Looking at the figure, we can identify the following use cases to be covered in this tutorial:
  1. You need to query which media are playable on your device, and whether they are Dolby experiences at all.
  2. You need to prepare the system rendering to properly render the Dolby experiences without inadvertently downgrading them.
  3. You may want to give your users a way to start, pause and stop the playback, and all the usual playback controls.
  4. Your users may have special accessibility needs, or may want to listen to the media in a language different from the default.
  5. You may want to give your users or your application a way to control the volume.
  6. When the media plays, you may need to give visual feedback as to where the playback cursor sits in the media.

We are assuming that you are familiar with general media playback using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. You do not need to understand any details of Dolby mediatypes, though being familiar with MPEG DASH manifest files is a bonus.