I've built a webapp to host low-res proxies of our teams video files. The webapp is primarily for tagging and searching video. Additionally, I'd like to be able to play a random playlist of clips on TVs around the office. I've implemented this by "Casting Tab" to a Chromecast, and it works fine.
However, now I'm running up against the bandwidth limitations of my host. Latency and everything is fine, but to run a single TV's 2.5Mbps stream 8hrs a day for 23 days a month comes to about 207 GB/month, 20% of my alotted 1TB monthly transfer.
How can i build something that will "cache" these clips client-side, so that it doesnt re-download them unnecessarily? There are about 1000 clips. I'd prefer to keep it connected to my webapp via browser or some API endpoint so the RAND() stream of clips is constantly updated as people add to it.
Note: I asked a related question yesterday, and it seemed to fix my specific issue, but it doesn't seem to have worked at scale, so I'm broadening the approach a bit. Browser Caching of images and videos served via php query strings
Shaka Player has built-in support for offline playback, along with a pretty good API for listing offline assets, and removing them again.
This would require that you have your videos in MPEG-DASH format. Luckily Google also has a tool available for that. Shaka Packager can take your mp4's and package them for MPEG-DASH, provided the MP4's follow some simple requirements.
You could probably build something yourself using similar mechanisms to the Shaka Player, but it seems much easier to use Shaka for doing it.
Related
I have several YouTube videos embedded on my website. I'm using the Jquery youtubeplaylist.js to load and play the movies. I recently noticed that the videos on my website stall and stutter occasionally. If I watch the same videos directly through YouTube then the videos load quickly and play smoothly.
Could it be the youtubeplaylist script that is causing the slow down? Or, could it be the fact that I am loading the video in at a custom size?
Also, does YouTube give preference to the videos played directly on their site?
I've seen the same problem, but there are too many variables to know for sure. It's clear that the nocookie player that loads from youtube-nocookie loads much slower than the regular player. Google has likely devoted fewer resources to this version of the player, probably because it garners less revenue to make up for the cost of serving video. Using the regular player, things do appear to be slower at times outside of YouTube, but that could be purely coincidental.
Having shared hosting or not shouldn't matter, since as you note the video stream is directly between Google's servers and the user's browser.
I am wondering if anyone has success with audio record (from microphone on the users browser) and playback from a web based app (Ruby/RoR)?
What I have found so far - I could write a flex/flash app which will record the audio and then have a server side like Red5 or so to receive and convert. This sounds more involved and I also saw different types of hosting issues etc people are having - so I am thinking there may be better/easier solutions out there!! I looked at html5/web-kit too but seems to only works on chrome and is limited to text fields etc.
In my app, i want to record users voice, save it on a aws/s3 as mp3 or similar file format and play it back to user within the app based on users input/choice. While flash based solution is workable for now, non-flash based solution will be preferred as it will support more devices (you know devices I am referring)..
The only options for web based record are Flash, Silverlight or Java. None of these will work on an iPhone or iPad - You will need a native app for that.
You don't need to use Red5 for Flash recording - you can record direct to memory, optionally encode (or zip), and then upload the the data. You might be better doing mp3 encoding server-side using ffmpeg or SoX before moving the file to s3.
There is a way using HTML5 and a server. Just record a video.
Convert the video to audio, then use the audio as you wish.
This implementation takes audio from a video and runs
ffmpeg to extract the audio:
http://goo.gl/A0bya
This is in PHP, but it should not be too
hard to create a Ruby version. Easy peasy.
This isn't clever nor fun but I'm stuck. A client of mine requires the need for a download of a presentation web site where videos can be embedded. Since OGG is a pretty obscure format for clients I ask them to upload MPEG4 encoded videos as either .mov, .mp4 or .m4v. These can be played using the HTML <video> or for browsers that don't support MPEG4 I use a Flash player (since that can play them).
This is fine for online and it works well.
When we go to download the presentation, the <video> element works fine in browsers that support MPEG4 video, even if they're local.
So we then come on to FireFox; this doesn't support MPEG4. Nor can I get Flash to locally play a video (because of security issues, unless we get them to go through the security settings but that isn't very nice).
So we resorted to using the good ol' <embed> tag but this is very buggy with FireFox. It works fine on a server, it even allows me to have custom controls, but locally the videos don't play.
I've had some Googling around and it seems like a security issue but want to get a definite answer. Does anyone know why it's not playing locally? The URL is fine and the file exists. I notice that it's common amongst version 4+ so could it be a codec issue? Is there another way I can get FireFox to play MPEG4s locally?
I'm developing a web system that (among other things) will be streaming video content to a limited number of users. There won't be more than 20 users at any one time, and they may be viewing videos from up to three cameras. However there are some restrictions on the setup of the network the clients have which are making this an absolute pain, and I'm stuck on ideas.
The cameras will be directly accessible from the web server running the software. The software server will be directly accessible to web users. However the cameras will not be able to be accessed by web users at all. So simply throwing up a flash player pointing to the url of the camera feeds isn't going to work. I need to present the video stream through the website in a cross-browser compatible manner, probably through a flash player like flowplayer, but flash is by no means a necessity.
So what are my options here? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The web software is an ASP.NET/C# website running on a Windows server. I'd prefer not to run another program on the server, but in the (likely) case that I do, the software needs to be able to run as a service so that it can run after a server restart with no user interaction. Also, free and/or cheap options would be prefreable.
The cameras are along the line of the AXIS 214 (there are others but they're similar AXIS cameras) and outputs MJPEG and MPEG4 streams at 640x480.
So I found a cheap windows application called WebcamXP: http://www.webcamxp.com/home.aspx
It suits my purposes almost perfectly. It captures the AXIS camera's stream with no problem, and re-streams it (in MJPEG from what I can tell). It also includes a small flash front-end with no controls, which may be a drawback for some, but perfect for my needs. You can just grab the embed code from WebcamXP and drop it into the website. Nice and simple.
I am asking this question on SO because a similar question was asked here and migrated to SuperUser, but the answers it got there were more about screen sharing than hosting screencasts. I'm hoping that some of you have faced (and solved) this issue before...
My team is putting together a bunch of technical screencasts, and we are currently hosting them ourselves. We would much prefer to host them externally, to take advantage of a bigger pipe, geographically distributed data centers, and better uptime.
The screencasts are typically less than 10 minutes.
Is there a programmer-centric screencast hosting solution? Would you recommend YouTube? Vimeo? Something else?
Since Jon's answer two years ago, there have been a few additions to the screencast market:
Screencast.com, by TechSmith. The makers of Snagit, Camtasia, and Jing have a place where you can host your Screencasts at any resolution. It's not as straightforward as Screenr, but it provides you many options to upload your videos. You can upload by file or directly from Snagit 11, Jing (Free), or Camtasia.
YouTube and Vimeo (Pro) continue to be good options if you're looking for a hosting platform and they now both support a large range of HD formats as well as supporting HTML5. The drawback (or benefit?) is that your video is going to be converted to their playback resolution(s) rather than your source resolution. Snagit 11 will even upload directly to YouTube now.
Screencast.com seems like a good option if your main concern is recording screencasts on the fly and getting them uploaded quickly.
YouTube and Vimeo are probably better choices if you want your videos to be visible to the widest possible audience.
While Vimeo is more of a professional site, YouTube offers HTML5 / H.264 video playback support for all videos, so they'll play on iPhone. Vimeo currently doesn't support that on user videos, and is planning on adding it as a pro feature in the future.
If you are really concerned about 1-to-1 pixel resolution in your screencast, Vimeo Pro is not the best choice. My files had an exact 1920 to 1080 resolution and I exported them from Screenflow in "lossless". It appeared very crisp on the Mac in Quicktime Player, but after uploading to Vimeo Pro, turning HD "on", I could not read the details.
Vimeo is quick, but they have a compression good for movie scenes, but bad for small computer screen fonts. I am trying screencast.com since they leave the file "as is".
Personally, I prefer to see videos on something like Vimeo rather than YouTube or a similar site. Vimeo has a certain air of professionalism about it while still be convenient and user-friendly. Also, you can put embedded videos on your support pages if you wish or simply link to the videos in FAQs or forums. It makes it very convenient. Again though, this is just MHO.
A popular modern option is Wistia. They are more expensive than say Vimeo, but they have excellent tools for collecting emails and for analyzing how well your videos are doing. Basically they are hosting combined with video marketing.
I decided to go with them for my indie-hacker screencasts site.