[HN Gopher] How Video Works
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2020-12-14 23:00 UTC)