The MPEG-DASH Media Presentation Description (MPD) is an XML document containing information about media segments, their relationships and information necessary to choose between them, and other metadata that may be needed by clients.
In this post, I describe the most important pieces of the MPD, starting from the top level (Periods) and going to the bottom (Segments). In a later post, I cover common informative metadata. Other topics that I might cover include MPD events, in-band events (‘emsg’), and encryption (DRM).