How Does the Selection of Available Bitrates Work on Android Devices

The general logic of the SmartTUBE app’s player when working with multi-bitrate streams is described below, as well as possible reasons for not showing some bitrates in the player interface.

1. The player loads data about the video tracks (including their bitrates) from the stream.
2. Checks which tracks are supported by the device (whether there are decoders supporting these formats).
3. If the track is supported, it is displayed in the Quality menu in the player.
4. If no track is directly supported by the device, the player uses a different playback mode. In this mode, the renderer tries to render formats with the supported mimeType, but with properties exceeding the renderer capabilities. There is a chance the renderer will be able to play the format in practice, because some renderers report their capabilities conservatively.
   1. If the attempt is successful, the track is played back.
   2. If not — the stream is not played back.