I'm working on a project for teachers and students to be able to have a medium to interact with one another using Azure as a medium for content delivery. However, since this is basically a free service (and a non-profit site), not every teacher can buy a copy of Encoder Pro to encode their streams.
This is where I'm at a crossroads and not sure what path to go down. I want teachers to be able to stream their desktops and interact with students, probably using the MSN chat services or facebook chat services since it's infrastructure that I don't need to pay for. However, additionally the question is how do they capture their desktop? And would Azure be able to convert that into a "smooth streaming" file, so that people with lower bandwith connections can see the stream reliabily? I know Azure can function as a CDN, but I'm not sure if it can do the conversion to live smooth streaming so that students can actually make use of the service.
Any ideas would be helpful.. I'm kind of brainstorming right now and working on the client end of things, but I've slowed down until I can figure out this problem.
Thanks!
To answer part of your question, Azure recently added a Media Services component. It's still in preview mode (free for now). Think of it as a hosted Expression Encoder Pro exposed with a bunch of APIs. For more info https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/media-services/
Related
I have a few questions:
It is possible to implement a "private messages" within GetStream?
Or, for example, can I combine Getstream API with http://social-stream.dit.upm.es/ ? (this system written on ROR).
It is possible to control and change algorithm, how Machine learning works in getstream.io ?
I mean, I found not much information about Machine learning in documentation and getstream account. Maybe I can read about it somewhere in more detail?
Machine learning works only on paid plans or in free plan also?
getstream.io have specific API for Machine learning purpose?
For example, if we write some additional features, like "private messages" on our side, which GetStream don't have in API, how we can apply Machine learning on this new features?
You may ask, "why you need a Machine learning for PM"?
Not only PM. Here a few examples:
a) If user have some keyword in PM - we can determine what the topic is interesting to the user.
b) In another scenario - we can analyze images (we use our engine for that purpose) in posts and if some image contain correlation between keywords and specific topic and if we look at who like/vote this image - we can show him more relative content.
c) There is dozens another examples, which we need to control Machine learning process.
Even if we implement Machine learning on our side (from zero, just "for private messages" and other related stuff), how we can connect our results in machine learning with results in GetStream? If we will use it separately, it can be inefficient and bring unpredictable results (even negative).
I want to clarify, I am not a developer. I am owner, but understand very well the project management and the entire development process.
My question is a lack of understanding of how the API works.
Thanks in advance!
Stream helps you build activity streams and newsfeeds. A central aspect of that is the follow relationship. The same building blocks also make it easy to build notification feeds and private messages. Stream isn't build for private messages, but we have dozens of apps using us for that purpose. It works for many apps, but depending on your feature set your milage may vary.
As for your second question. Stream provides scalable newsfeeds, analytics and personalization (machine learning). For larger customers we extensively customize the machine learning component. There are similarities between apps, but it's definitely something which needs to be tailor made. At the moment analytics and personalization are only available to our largest customers. More information can be found here: http://getstream.io/personalization/
Using your own machine learning and Stream's at the same time is pretty easy. You simply track engagement events both in Stream and in your own system. That will allow you to run your own analysis.
We've been asked if we can help a client stream uploaded video files while overlaying a unique watermark per user, eg, their email address or username. Security on the stream needs to be good, but not necessarily ironclad. That is, enough to put someone off trying to grab the bits outside of the player (so some encryption is very helpful), while the overlay would hopefully make it clear that re-recording it, or saving the file, would help us track the perpetrator.
I was hoping some combo of Azure Media Services and the Azure Media Player might be able to do something like this, but for the life of me I can't find anything online about it.
We're not wedded to Azure if it's not possible using that service but is through an alternative.
Thanks so much for your help. It feels like this shouldn't be a unique request, but I can't find anything on Google. Maybe my search terms are letting me down.
It really depends if you are trying to do server side watermarking or client side watermarking. Currently Azure Media Services doesn't have support for server side watermarking.
However, this is easily achieved on the client side with Azure Media Player -> because the player uses HTML elements, you can easily add an additional HTML element for your overlay and style it with CSS to display the required information.
I have a very general question on how to implement VoIP for our current mobile & Web App. (we have an Android+iOS App and a Web Application based on AngularJS/NodeJS).
What we want to achieve
In the first step we want to achieve inter Application Voice and Video Calls. Later on we might expand into outbound calls into the normal telephone network. But this post is mainly for getting info on how to implement only our first step.
general thoughts
We had some experiences with Asterisk before which turned out to be far from easy. So for this project we wanted to get some feedback before actually implementing anything.
thoughts on technology
At first I thought it might be a good idea to use WebRTC, but since it's only supported on Chrome, FF and Opera for the moment and pretty much is unsupported for native mobile Apps we think that WebRTC is probably out of the picture for now. (or do you think otherwise?)
After searching the web a bit more we found this: http://www.webrtc.org/native-code
Has anyone experience with this libs? It seems to us, that this could be the best solution for a modern voip solution (and also would allow us to skip the asterisk server)
The second idea would be to setup an Asterisk Server for ourselves. Every time a user logs into the App we would connect him as a SIP Client to the asterisk. If one user calls the other one we think we should be able to make the call for example with the node package Asterisk Manager API (https://github.com/pipobscure/NodeJS-AsteriskManager).
The third idea would be to use a SIP Provider, but at the moment I'm not sure if that's really the best idea.
Since we're no VoIP experts, are there any other possibilities for VoIP integration into our apps?
Any thoughts on that subject would be very appreciated! Thank you!
The main factor is the network configuration that you app will be working with. Given you're using mobile clients and web apps it's almost certain that you're using the internet and also likely that you'll have 3G and 4G mobile networks in the mix (3G/4G cause a lot more problems for VoIP than WiFi).
Given the above assumption holds the biggest challenge your app will have is establishing media (audio and/or video) connections between mobile clients which are behind different NATs and in a lot of cases multiple NATs. There is almost no chance you'd be able to get by without a server here. The server will be needed to act as a relay point for the media streams for the mobile clients. You will use the RTP protocol for the media and working out how to get it reliably from client A to client B is your biggest obstacle. The signalling side - whether it be SIP, web sockets or something else - will be secondary (note both SIP and WebRTC use RTP to carry the media).
If I were in your shoes the steps I'd take would be:
Install and try out some softphones (blink, bria, zoiper et al) on your own mobile devices, find a SIP provider that supports video calls and get some experience with calls. It may not be the experience you anticipated...
Once you are comfortable with the softphone experience you would then need to make two decisions:
Whether to deploy your own server or use an existing provider,
Whether to write your own client, find an existing one or something in between.
I can answer the deploy your own server question. You don't want to do that unless the VoIP part of your app is going to be something you charge for and make a good margin off. Running a VoIP server and all the security and network considerations that go along with it is a full time job. It may start out being easy but once a few customers start connecting and the fraudsters come along it will take on a life of its own. In the decade I've been messing around with SIP I'd estimate 75% of providers have gone out of business and it was their full time job.
Besides all that I'd be surprised if there wasn't a SIP provider that suited your needs. These days there are highly sophisticated services available that led you control every aspect of your call flow with your own code (anveo, tropo, twilio) right down to free services (sip2sip, sipbroker) that may be all you need to get started.
For the client software there are various SIP SDK's you'll be able to leverage (pjsip).
I need to develop a system to stream media over the web to subscribers (like Netflix). It's very important that my consumers can't "save on disk" my videos, since I'll be billing them by the minute watched...
I would like to know how video-streaming-DRM software, like the one behind Netflix, actually work. How the encryption happens? Do they use symmetric keys? I don't need specifics about the implementation, not now at least, but rather a overview of the whole system (client and server)
Extra Info:
-I will be the one uploading videos. The user wont upload videos
-I intend to build this as a Azure Cloud Native App
-I have not yet decided on the client side yet. Since my target public is quite narrow, I'm considering if I should build a app client or web-client... in case of web I would like to leverage the new DRM capabilities ...
-The server side will be C#
-It's safe to assume that the end-user will have a "decent 3ยบ world" internet connection (at least 1 Mb/s)
Although quite reasonable, your question does not really fit the Stack Overflow's format. But I'll give you some hints and resources to check out:
Microsoft PlayReady Overview - check it and related pages (like Learn More, White Paper)
EZDRM
Content Protection with Windows Azure Media Services
Task Preset for Windows Azure Media Encryptor
Clients of DRM protected content can be developed in Silverlgiht, Windows Store App, iOS native app (this one is not open to the wide public!). Never tried Android and HTML 5.
In short - don't worry! If you use a DRM solution, your users will not be able to save the videos. However, one can always do a screen capture using [Expression Encoder Screen Capture | Camtasia Studio | Any screen capturing software]. So there is no full 100% content protection.
I'm doing a language web site for my university language center, where students login and see videos to learn English. i have to do it like this,
person is logging in to the system, search using a search area and find the details,lessons and videos relevant to that videos. this functionality exactly matches the youtube scenario.
for implementing twitter like functionality we can use status-net, is there a similer library, statusnet like famous implementation for youtube or a some kind of platform or a framework like codeigniter that we can use to implement youtube like site very easily??
please suggest some options?? a open source one or a commercial one ???
and what is the best video format to use in a such web site?? flv?? mp4?? or mov???
regards,
Rangana
Your best option is to use a 'cloud' based video processing service. Most have a sample project / library for many different languages and frameworks. Here is a list of a few I've tried and liked:
http://zencoder.com/
http://transloadit.com/
http://pandastream.com/
The typical steps involve uploading the video files to a large 'cloud' static asset host (such as S3) through the browser. If you are inexperienced it is best to select a processor that provides an uploader (it will handle putting the files in the right spot). Of the three, Transloadit and Panda both have custom unloaders.
Usually the service will allow you to either pass the encoding settings (what formats and qualities to) output to as parameters or configure them in your account. To support all current HTML5 browsers you just need H264 (.m4a) and OGG (.ogv). However, the new trend in the video world is for WEBM (.webm) so you might want to include it as well.
Next you will receive a unique code from the web service that you must store in persistent storage (database). The web service can be configured to 'callback' (perform an HTTP POST or GET request to your service) once the video is encoded.
Once your recieve a callback you can activate your video and start dislpaying it on your pages. For displaying, if you are inexperienced I'd highly recommend you use one of the following players:
http://sublimevideo.net/
http://longtailvideo.com/
http://videojs.com/
They all do similar things for different prices. My current personal favourite is Sublime Video (it offers cool light box effects and a gorgeous player).
Why do you have to re-implement Youtube when you can just use it for hosting your videos for free? Many online e-learning portals (e.g. Khan academy) do exactly that.
As far as the best video format to use -- go read about H.264/AVC. It's what Youtube currently uses.
I think you will not find already built solution ;)
But it's not really that hard. You can use existing frameworks that will make your life easier while you build account management system, the rest shouldn't be really that hard (assuming you don't really want to re-build the whole Youtube ;D ).
For playing videos, you can use JW Player. A great piece of software, you should check it out.