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
Related
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.
So, I'm working on an application where admins will be able to upload videos, for others to view on different platforms (mobile devices, computers etc). It is to be hosted on Azure, and I'm having a bit difficulty figuring out if I need to use Media services or simply a CDN.
When does it make sense to use the Media services over simply uploading to a blob and viewing through CDN? What are the advantages of using one over another?
Microsoft Azure CDN pulls content from Azure Media Services streaming server, so you could stream your content from the edge. You don't have to use a CDN if you don't need to deliver content in a large scale at a time. Rather, you could directly streaming content from streaming server offered by Azure Media Services.
The reason you maybe confused is because there are CDN vendors in the market (such as Akamai) offers streaming server capability. But by CDN itself, the edge network was just for caching the bits, not acting like a streaming server.
Cheers,
Mingfei Yan
I´m planning a Azure Web Api and one of the requests is to let users upload Images from their mobile devices to our Blob Storage. The Clients are Windows Phones, iPhones and Android Phones.
Trying to plan the solution, I found a lot of tutorials doing this with Azure Mobile Services. But with scaling requirements, this solution should not be used. Instead we want the Clients to upload Images directly into our Blob Storage, secured by SAS (generated by our Api).
Does anyone knows how to handle the upload of all kinds of actual mobile OS without Mobile Services? Does anyone have some links to tutorials, how-to´s, etc.?
Edit:
I´m not shure, how all different devices handle their photo Uploads?
Posting form data? Mulitpart?
Uploading via REST?
Uploading via FTP?
Because of this question I search for some hints to plan the project forward to accept the simplest solution for all mobile OS.
Any application capable of sending web requests could do the trick, you'll have to be more specific about your needs.
Using the blob REST API ("put" method) as described here is doable from any application. It's only a matter of sending a Http request containing the right headers and the blob as request body. You'll probably have to come up with a way for distributing the shared acces keys if the containers aren't public.
I've been using the Azure Mobile Service for the last 4 months and I'm very happy with the results.I can create and maintain a backend service with no issues.
The only thing I did not find how to implement is Image Manipulation and Hosting.
My iOS app needs to upload files to the server and the server will resize/crop the images to generate some thumbnails.
Right now Im hosting the images in Amazon s3 and the resizing is done in the client. The problem with is that I need to upload 2 images instead of just one.
What are the options to solve my situation using only the Azure Mobile Services?
For storing images, you could possibly use Azure Blob Storage instead of Amazon S3. One benefit you would get out of it is lower latency between your mobile service and storage.
Coming to your 2nd question, you would need some kind of server side processing to work with the images once they're received at the mobile service end. I've not worked extensively with node.js, but a quick search led me to this thread on SO: Which library should I use for server-side image manipulation on Node.JS?. You could possibly use one of the libraries mentioned there to process the image in mobile service itself and then push both images into storage.
I have to make some kind of service, where people can record a video/an audio from the browser and watch/listen it later.
Is there any way to capture audio/video from the browser and instantly upload it to Microsoft Azure cloud service, that would be work on mobile devices too?
I've found how to upload existing video with C# or Java, but I need to stream it to Azure or in an extreme case somehow save it to the my server and upload it with C#/Java to Azure.
I would be grateful for any idea!