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• WebRTC books – a brief review

  1er janvier 2014, par silvia

  I just finished reading Rob Manson’s awesome book “Getting Started with WebRTC” and I can highly recommend it for any Web developer who is interested in WebRTC.

  Rob explains very clearly how to create your first video, audio or data peer-connection using WebRTC in current Google Chrome or Firefox (I think it also now applies to Opera, though that wasn’t the case when his book was published). He makes available example code, so you can replicate it in your own Web application easily, including the setup of a signalling server. He also points out that you need a ICE (STUN/TURN) server to punch through firewalls and gives recommendations for what software is available, but stops short of explaining how to set them up.

  Rob’s focus is very much on the features required in a typical Web application :

  • video calls
  • audio calls
  • text chats
  • file sharing

  In fact, he provides the most in-depth demo of how to set up a good file sharing interface I have come across.

  Rob then also extends his introduction to WebRTC to two key application areas : education and team communication. His recommendations are spot on and required reading for anyone developing applications in these spaces.

  —

  Before Rob’s book, I have also read Alan Johnson and Dan Burnett’s “WebRTC” book on APIs and RTCWEB protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web.

  Alan and Dan’s book was written more than a year ago and explains that state of standardisation at that time. It’s probably a little out-dated now, but it still gives you good foundations on why some decisions were made the way they are and what are contentious issues (some of which still remain). If you really want to understand what happens behind the scenes when you call certain functions in the WebRTC APIs of browsers, then this is for you.

  Alan and Dan’s book explains in more details than Rob’s book how IP addresses of communication partners are found, how firewall holepunching works, how sessions get negotiated, and how the standards process works. It’s probably less useful to a Web developer who just wants to implement video call functionality into their Web application, though if something goes wrong you may find yourself digging into the details of SDP, SRTP, DTLS, and other cryptic abbreviations of protocols that all need to work together to get a WebRTC call working.

  —

  Overall, both books are worthwhile and cover different aspects of WebRTC that you will stumble across if you are directly dealing with WebRTC code.

• Evolution of Multimedia Fiefdoms

  1er octobre 2014, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I want to examine how multimedia fiefdoms have risen and fallen through the years.

  
  
  

  Back in the day, the multimedia fiefdoms were built around the formats put forth by competing companies : there was Microsoft/WMV, Apple/MOV, and Real/RM as the big contenders. On2 always wanted to be a player in this arena but could never quite catch a break. A few brave contenders held the line for open source and also for the power users who desired one application that could handle everything (my original motivation for wanting to get into multimedia hacking).

  The computer desktop was the battleground for internet-based media stream. Whatever happened to those days ? Actually, if memory serves, Flash-based video streaming stepped on all of them.

  Over the last 6-7 years, the battleground has expanded to cover mobile devices, where Flash’s impact has… lessened. During this time, multimedia technology pretty well standardized on a particular stack, namely, the MPEG (MP4/H.264/AAC) stack.

  The belligerents in this war tried for years to effectively penetrate new territory, namely, the living room where the television lived. This had been slowgoing for years due to various user interface and content issues, but steadily improved.

  Last April, Amazon announced their entry into the set-top box market with the Fire TV. That was when it suddenly crystallized for me that the multimedia ecosystem has radically shifted. Now, the multimedia fiefdoms revolve around access to content via streaming services.

  Off the top of my head, here are some of the fiefdoms these days (fiefdoms I have experience using) :

  • Netflix (subscription streaming)
  • Amazon (subscription, rental, and purchased streaming)
  • Hulu Plus (subscription streaming)
  • Apple (rental and purchased media)

  I checked some results on Can I Stream.It ? (which I refer to often) and found a bunch more streaming fiefdoms such as Google (both Play and YouTube, which are separate services), Sony, Xbox 360, Crackle, Redbox Instant, Vudu, Target Ticket, Epix, Sony, SnagFilms, and XFINITY StreamPix. And surely, these are probably just services available in the United States ; I know other geographical regions have their own fiefdoms.

  What happened ?

  When I got into multimedia hacking, there were all these disparate, competing ecosystems. As a consumer, I didn’t care where the media came from, I just wanted to play it. That’s what inspired me to work on open source multimedia projects. Now I realize that I have the same problem 10-15 years later : there are multiple competing ecosystems. I might subscribe to fiefdoms X and Y, but am frustrated to learn that something I’d like to watch is only available through fiefdom Z. Very few of these fiefdoms can be penetrated using open source technology.

  I’m not really sure about the point about this whole post. Multimedia technology seems really standardized these days. But that’s probably just my perspective because I have spent way too long focusing on a few areas of multimedia technology such as audio and video coding. It’s interesting that all these services probably leverage the same limited number of codecs. Their differentiation comes from the catalog of content that each is able to license for streaming. There are different problems to solve in the multimedia arena now.

• How to create a video thumbnail without ffmpeg or HTML5 video canvas ? [duplicate]

  14 mai 2014, par user3631926

  This question already has an answer here :

  • How to generate thumbnails on Amazon S3 ?
    
    2 answers
    

  I need to create a thumbnail from a video, I have tried the below options but they didn’t work for my case. I am using S3 and CloudFront.

  1. ffmpeg is not supported via my hosting because I am using a shared hosting and I need to upgrade to VPS or dedicated server if I want to use ffmpeg.

  2. I tried taking a screenshot from the video using HTML5 drawImage and toDataURL functions, but it is throwing SecurityError because my video file is located on Amazon CloudFront and my code is hosted somewhere else.

  Is there any other option or a workaround to the second option ? I don’t want to upgrade my server for just the thumbnail issue.