[HN Gopher] How Video Works ___________________________________________________________________ How Video Works Author : circuit_ Score : 40 points Date : 2020-12-14 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (howvideo.works) (TXT) w3m dump (howvideo.works) | tester756 wrote: | I wish I knew all this earlier this year, so I'd be writting | different thing as my thesis | | Great explaination tho. | Sean-Der wrote: | I really love all the work the Mux team is doing! They don't just | throw APIs over the wall. They are putting in lots of effort to | educate/empower developers. This is good stuff, and not just | propietary knowledge to sell something. | | Also check out the video-dev Slack[0] and demuxed. Pion WebRTC | and WebRTC for the Curious was motivated by conversations I had | with other developers in their Slack. | | [0] https://video-dev.herokuapp.com | | [1] https://demuxed.com | AnotherGoodName wrote: | One thing i'd love to see added here is a blurb about the | importance of the location of the video metadata in the file. | Specifically that you need to have the metadata at the start of | the file rather than the end of the file (which is the default) | for low-latency playback on web. | | Explained: Freshly recorded MPEG (and almost all other container | types) typically saves the header at the end of the file. This is | the logical place to store header information after recording as | you just append to the end of the file you've just written. It's | the default. | | Unfortunately having the header at the end of the file is | terrible for web playback. A user must download the entire video | before playback starts. You absolutely need to re-encode the | video with FAST-Start set. | | The header location is the number one mistake that i've seen a | lot of website and developers make. If you find your website | videos have a spinner that's seconds long before the video | playback starts check the encoding. Specifically check that | you've set fast start. | | I've seen companies who have a perfectly reasonable static site | behind a CDN spend a fortune hosting their videos with a third | party to fix the latency issues they were seeing. The expensive | third party was ultimately fixing the issue because they re- | encoded the videos with fast start set. The reality is their | existing solution backed by a CDN would also have worked if they | encoded the videos correctly. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-12-14 23:00 UTC)