Can I have persistent encoding job in Azure?
I want to upload video stream into page blob and encode it on the fly when new portion of data is available.
Can it be done with azure or I need 3rd party solution like wowza?
Adding to the comments of David Makogon - no, currently you cannot achieve your goal. The current state of Azure Media Services works only for Video-On-Demand. What you need is more like a live streaming.
For live streaming you can use IIS Media Services. You can install IIS Media Services along with the Transform Manager Extension. To almost fully achieve your goal. And you can do this on a Windows Server image of Azure Virtual Machine.
To achieve elasticity and scalability however will not be an easy task.
To conclude - the current state of all Azure services is not 100% suitable for your scenario. And it does not provide out-of-the-box solution for your need. If you find a 3rd party provider that suits your needs today, then just go ahead and test/use it.
Related
To clarify: I have a website hosted in Azure. I want to add a 1.5 minute howto video. I can't imagine it will get shown more than a few tens or hundreds a month (maybe a few thousand if the site takes off).
I was planning on using Azure Media Player to play the video.
In relation to this I thought the video would sit in a streaming endpoint.
But this seems an expensive way of doing this. Are there better ways (especially cheaper)?
EDIT: is it possible to host the video elsewhere and have it embedded in Azure?
The cheap way to do this would be to place the video in a blob storage then play it using a web page.
There is a video explaining how to do this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmzns7PgP0A
I would recommended to use Media Service: video-on-demand, content delivery service with an Azure Media Services application in the Azure portal.
Azure Media Services lets you deliver any media, on virtually any device, to anywhere in the world using the cloud. The collection of services provide encoding, live or on-demand streaming, content protection and indexing for video and audio content.
The Windows Azure Media Services platform has four types of services: content uploading, encoding, encrypting content and streaming.
Media Service Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/media-services/
Additional information : Streaming Videos from Azure ( Blob or Media Services)
I'm currently looking into Azure Streaming service for client purposes and I am wondering if there is a way to create time limited URL for Adaptive Streaming (we need this for security purposes, when user wants to stream, we verify permissions then create time limited URL). I see that Streaming Locator can have the end date, but is it really the best practice to create new Streaming Locator each time when someone requests the stream? That means I would need to persist them, then clean them up after expiration. Is there any better way to create time limited URL for adaptive streaming in Azure Media Services?
I would recommend looking at the token authentication capabilities available in Azure CDN from Verizon Premium SKU - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-token-auth. This would be the simplest path to take. The Azure CDN from Verizon Premium SKU can be enabled directly from configuration on your streaming endpoint. The endpoint will need to be stopped in order to enable Azure CDN for it. You could also accomplish directly using content protection capabilities available in Media Services - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/previous/media-services-content-protection-overview. This path is much more complex one to take and would require significantly more development work.
If I was to use Azure Media Services to consume encoding of small video files and then playing back on a web app and mobile app, do i need to turn on the 'Streaming Endpoint' option? I am getting charged ~$65 a month just to have streaming endpoint, not sure if i need it.
The pricing doesn't quite make sense because I can get the same basic features from Vimeo for $7 a month.
Am I consuming this correctly?
If I was to use Azure Media Services to consume encoding of small video files and then playing back on a web app and mobile app, do i need to turn on the 'Streaming Endpoint' option?
Yes, the official documentation explains that a streaming endpoint is the service that delivers content directly to the client application for live-streaming, video on demand, or progressive download.
So this means that you would need at least one streaming endpoint to be able to serve your videos to a client. A Media Services account already includes a default standard streaming endpoint. According to the documentation, this default streaming endpoint would be enough for the vast majority of workloads.
Take a look at the pricing page for more info: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/media-services/
According to the pricing page, the default streaming endpoint does cost ~$65/mo.
In regards to your comparison with Vimeo, the service that you end up using really depends on your particular case. While I understand pricing is a big factor when building an application, you should still consider the security of your videos at rest and in transit, scalability, availability of services, support, etc.
I am in the middle of developing services that will deal with media files (audio/video) . These services are responsible for uploading and then streaming media files uploaded by client (IOS, Android but not limited to these devices/platforms).
We are using node.js with mongodb as database. In the near future our services will be part of Azure. (Portions of our backend are already there in Azure)
In that case i came across Azure media services. I know that it does't have any sdk to work with for Node.js so my only option here is to use REST Service from Azure Media Services.
My question are:
1) Whats the correct approach adapted in this scenario by developers already handling this scenario. I am open for approaches/practices here and change what i am planning to do currently.
2)If i use Azure Media Services. How would my client calls my services (node.js) which acts as a proxy for calling REST Services for Azure Media Services. How will this exactly work and i have file in hand in my proxy to re-upload. Or i will internally direct my services so that internally it uploads to Media Services .
3)How these media files uploaded in media services are related to a record in MongoDB. Like a record can have multiple media files.
I appreciate any pointers/explanations here.
Thanks,
To proper answer your question there are few questions need to be answered.
1.What functionality are you going to provide on top of azure media services. From your question it seems that main goal to let users to upload asset and them to have ability to stream uploaded content.
For this purpose you need to have following steps to be implemented in node js.
Create asset and asset files records in Azure Media Service(WAMS) by calling REST API. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh973617.aspx
Create access policy and locator which will give URI of blob storage where file needs to be uploaded. WAMS REST API
Upload file using node.js to blob storage http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/how-to-guides/blob-storage/
Create encoding job which will encode you input into multi bitrate mp4. WAMS REST API
Package your multi bitrate mp4 to smooth or HLS format or utilize dinamic packaging feature in WAMs. http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Azure-Media-Services-Tutorials/Introduction-to-dynamic-packaging
Once you ready to stream your content you need to give user client playback url pointing to origin server. In order to do this you have to call WAMS REST API and create origin locator
Assets are exposing ID and AlternativeID properties which you can use to map your metadata about content with WAMS assets and implement any additional Content Management logic.
You need to act as proxy if you have some user based authentication and don't want to have dedicate separate azure media account to one user. WAMS provides basic blocks for asset ingest, encode, package, ondemand delivery and in nearest future for live streaming.
It can be used as foundation for your cms system or you can act SSAS provider by adding additional authentication, authorization layer. Currently you can use third party offerings http://www.ezdrm.com/ for playback DRM protection or your own license server http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn223278.aspx.
I have a small solution but I think it will require some work from you, maybe you wont like it that much, how about working with Windows Azure Mobile services. it support adding NPM now, the reason that I am telling you to use the Windows Azure Mobile services is that it will help you connect to your clients whatever was the application platform used.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/14/windows-azure-major-updates-for-mobile-backend-development.aspx
to integrate between the .Net and Node Js you can start by using Edge JS or signalR I think.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/the_edge_of_net_and_node
http://www.asp.net/signalr
I just want to suggest an idea that might be helpful to work around the lack of support of Media services in Node Js is that you use Blob storage for streaming. after all the Media Services is based on the Blob storage I think. here is a link that will guide you with the usage of the blob storage.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/how-to-guides/blob-storage/
here is also a question posted before about how to stream from blob storage using Node JS I hope you find it beneficial.
How to stream a Windows Azure Blob to the client using Node.js?
Getting contents of a streaming Blob to be sent to a Node.js Server
here is also another link that will help you to do so "Geo-Protection for Video Blobs Using a Node.js Media Proxy"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn198240.aspx
Just wanted to make sure that you got the Windows Azure Node Js SDK, you might find some solutions that can help you with the development of you application.
https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-node
I hope my answer helps you let me know if you need anything else.
I have more recent Typescript based samples now for AMS v3 API using our latest javascript Node.js SDK here
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/media-services-v3-node-tutorials
I would like to create a Metro application that allows a group of people to interact. One person would create data and serve as the owner, and multiple others would be invited in and be allow to modify that data. I heard from Build talks that each Metro application will get per-user Azure storage, but will it be possible to share that data between multiple users? Does anyone have a link they could share where I could research this?
I think that you are confusing SkyDrive with Azure Blob Storage.
SkyDrive
Personal to a Live ID
Not really meant as a base for collaborative work
Azure Blob Storage
You can have public files that anyone can view and update
You can have a lease on file that only allows certain people to edit it
Since you own the Azure account you also control the content
You can learn the basics here
If you want to share private app data between users, the best way to do so would be via a shared server of some sort. You should have a server (running on Azure, Amazon EC2, or anything really) that exposes a REST-ful web service which each application connects to. The shared state then lives on that server.
This is better than trying to use skydrive or some file-based system for storing shared data. With a file on skydrive and multiple users trying to access it, you would run into concurrency issues when more than 1 person tries to write to it.
You don't get Azure with Metro.
With Live you get a free SkyDrive that is a personal cloud storage. Like 10 GB. Can share files but it is via sending an email link. It is not file storage that would readily support a server type application to manage that sharing.
Azure is a cloud platform for file and data sharing. Azure is not free but storage cost is only $0.125 / GB per month. 10 GB = $1.25 / month. Using SkyDrive as shared storage you are giving up a lot of developer and hosting tools that come with Azure to save $1.25 / month.
It looks like there is a more formal definition of this with the updated help now available. They were referring to roaming application data. I found the following links that provide guidance:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464917.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465094.aspx
The general is that a small amount of temporary application data is provided on a per-app, per-user basis. The actual size you get is not detailed, but the guidance is pretty clear - app settings only, no large data sets, and don't use it for instant synchronization. Given this guidance, my plan is not a good one and will change.