I'm trying to setup a video file upload using UDP protocol onto Windows Azure Media Services. I have not found any code sample or documentation to give me a headstart. Could somebody help me on this matter and provide me some code sample or a documentation or the concept?
Thanks in advance!!
Azure Media Services is a platform as a service which uses Azure as the backend. Specifically, it uses Azure Storage. If you are using the .Net Media Services SDK to upload, then you may not notice that it is wrapping the AzStorage SDK calls for transfer. If you are using the REST directly, you will notice that any PUT calls are heading straight for your storage account. In both of these cases, all Media Services is doing it providing the SAS URLs for uploading to the backend storage.
At this time, AzStorage supports only HTTP PUT for uploads.
In addition, Azure has recently on-boarded a 3rd party solution for fast uploading, look for Aspera in the marketplace. Note that this is a tiered subscription service and may require the purchase of client-side software (same model as Amazon S3, incase your doing side-by-side comparisons).
I did a full walk-through a few months ago on my blog:
http://blog-ndrouin.azurewebsites.net/?p=561
The blog needs a bit of maintenance since the service is no longer in preview, but you'll get the idea.
Media Services is still a preview feature. UDP will only be available in the RTM release:
By the RTM release, Media Services will offer integration with partner
components to provide fast UDP (User Datagram Protocol) upload
solutions.
Related
I see that I can either connect directly (through Rest HTTP requests) to Google Firebase API but I can also connect it to Azure Notification Hub. I also understand that Firebase is free while Azure isn't.
Can you kindly describe what is the benefit of connecting Firebase to Azure rather than directly connecting to Google's API (if any)?
I'm using ASP.Net Core MVC as my backend.
Thank you
If you are doing one push platform only (Firebase in your case) and only considering basic scenarios, then there's not much difference between using it directly or via Notification Hubs (NH).
However, NH provides you with a set of really powerful features:
Cross-platform SDKs to allow device registrations from all major OSes and a unified way of sending pushes no matter which platform they are on
A feature that is unique across similar services is tagging and routing
Templating
Basic or extended telemetry
And some other features.
So, in short, yes you can do everything that NH does by yourself. It's just you'll spend a lot of time (and money on resources required to run it) while doing it. And this is an out of the box solution that has been tested through years and is used by some of the largest products on the market.
I'm planning to write my own .NET app on my personal time so will take months. I google and found there are two Azure Emulator:
Compute.
Storage.
While Storage is not needed right now as I don't need blob, messaging and file services, Compute is what I need, so I can develop and debug app w/o connecting to Azure all the time, plus saving $$$.
However, MS site only has Storage for download at Azure SDK. Links for Compute are all not-found.
Is Compute Emulator dropped by MS? Or, it's now developed and supported by third party like this now? http://windows-azure-emulator.software.informer.com/
BTW, is it safe to download this one?
Thanks for those provided all input.
Answer is: No need for any Emulator if building a Web App (or called site). Simply develop as you would using local IIS or IIS Express, of course Community is ok. Then when it's time to move to Azure, use "Web Deploy".
Details of What type of app/services you'd choose for Azure, refer to this:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-web/choose-web-site-cloud-service-vm
I want to deploy Kentico 9 site on Azure and want to use shared file system for my media content, can you please suggest which Azure configuration (Azure Cloud Services or Azure Web Apps) I should referred?
I'd highly recommend going with Web App over Cloud Services. Mainly because Web App is almost like running on a regular server where Cloud Services is quite a bit different and harder to work with in my opinion.
Check this article out regarding some issues with Kentico and Azure Blog storage as well as how to setup your storage provider to only store media files.
http://www.kehrendev.com/blog/brenden-kehren/may-2016/problems-with-azure-and-kentico
Could you describe what do you mean by shared file system for my media content?
From my experience - it`s (a little bit) easier to deploy (and maintain) Kentico to Azure Web Apps but they do not provide so many customizations - in my humble opinion - the biggest one is you are not able to connect via remote desktop (but this is supported by Azure Cloud Services).
Please note - if you are using Cloud Services you must use Azure Blob Storage - source - which could be in conflict with your requirements.
You can find more information about Web Apps vs Cloud Services vs Virtual Machines on the mentioned page.
TL;DR; - if you do not need customizations, remote desktop and startup tasks - go for WebApps. If not, try to specify more requirements.
You can also check comparinson of the technologies from the Microsoft`s point of view here.
It's not clear who you want to share the media with...
If you want to share the assets amongst more Kentico instances or with a 3rd party system, I'd probably use the Azure Blob Storage. Kentico comes with a dedicated file provider for this exact use out of the box. It's called CMS.AzureStorage.
Using the blob storage is not a limiting factor in terms of hosting your app. You can still use all available options: Web Apps, VM or Cloud Service. There are some technical implications, of course. But they're all described in the documentation.
I recommend checking the comparison matrix to find a hosting option that suits your need best. Kentico recommends using App Service (Web Apps) for most projects as it's easiest to maintain. However, you can't use certain features like Kentico Windows services, for instance. Question is, do you really need them?
We have built a simple mobile app that connects to ASP.net Web-API 2.
We would like to use Microsoft client SDK for it's offline sync support.
Now that Azure Mobile Apps support custom authentication we could actually take the leap.
I want to know out if the offline sync SDK absolutely requires us to use Azure Mobile App or Azure Mobile Services.
Microsoft documentation is full of how-to guides but does not explain what happens under the hood. The best I could understand, both are just OData rest API's and swagger for documentation.
Can the Azure Mobile Client SDK work with API server created on top of ordinary ASP Web-App, outside Azure?
What is it about the Azure Mobile App that makes the magic happen?
Vladmir,
On top of OData, in order to support features like soft delete, offline sync and others, the Azure Mobile Client SDK expects the server to implement a certain protocol. So although the answer to your question:
[does the] sync SDK absolutely requires us to use Azure Mobile App?
... is no, and in theory, you could implement your own API, but I would recommend against doing so, since (among other reasons) even if you manage to implement the expected conventions and behaviors, this will become a maintenance challenge down the road if you need to upgrade the client SDK to take advantage of bug fixes and/or new features.
The good news is that with the latest release of the Azure Mobile Apps server SDK, adding mobile capabilities to an existing ASP.NET Web API application is trivial, and you should be able to enable the scenarios you're looking for simply by adding the appropriate Table controllers. So you can just enhance your existing application and not have to develop and maintain the Azure Mobile Apps specific logic yourself.
About your last question, since both, the client and the server SDK are both open source and developed in the open, you can look at what what makes the magic happen here:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-server
https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-client
I hope this helps!
The answer for your first question: Yes the SDK can be used in any Server API you have since it will be your entry point to work with Azure Mobile Services.
The Azure Mobile app creates a mobile services instance which has push notifications and SQL tables to store all messages you would like to send with the capability to customize the message as needed. Also it creates a notifications hub instance under the hood to manage notifications for all mobile platforms. Azure mobile apps provide offline capabilities through native sync services between db on your devices and the server when connectivity is present.
Feel free to ask more questions to have a full understanding on How mobile apps works.
Hope this helps.
Have anyone used azure media service with xamarin. I am trying to make an portable library which can upload / retrieves video asseset from a standard azure media server. However I am not able to install the nuget package into my project.
Can anyone point me in the right direction
I don't think the default azure media libary is a portable library therefore you cannot add it to your portable library project.
You could however implement this using the available rest documentation.
Media Services Rest Api
We've done something similar for access to blob storage. To avoid having to reference all the azure storage libraries in all our projects.