Development of interactive Web services involves extensive use of JavaScript. If 10 years ago the language had but a meager functionality, today JS has substantially transformed. Therefore, more of service logics is moved to the client side. In this post, we will share with you our hands-on experience in designing and implementing large-scale Web applications. Continue reading
In the latest iOS based devices, camera is a major driver of popularity of these devices. The capability to capture video and encode it to H.264 High Definition on the hardware level that emerged in iPhone 4, has been accepted enthusiastically by both users and developers of new applications. Continuing our series dedicated to AV Foundation and the related frameworks, in this post we will discuss how to capture a stream from the camera and how to process, save and distribute it. Continue reading
Apple iOS mobile devices have deservedly won universal popularity among the customers. Every Apple’s event is followed with a keen interest as the people expect the emergence of new functionality and improvement of existing features. But the common users can only skim the surface, assessing the externals of the product. Much more is visible to the developers. Of all the four-day WWDC event, the public attention has been given to the keynote presentation only, giving an overview of all the major innovations. All the other presentations, totaling to about one hundred, have been dedicated to the developers. From this ratio, we can estimate the hidden mass of the iceberg, which is no less fascinating than its tip. Starting a series of posts on iOS based development, we will tell you of the Apple devices built-in frameworks to support online video handling. Continue reading
Over the past two years, we have witnessed a rapid growth of a new trend in the mass TV set market. Next generation TV sets that are connected to the Internet and empowered with an application platform, are becoming exceedingly popular. Like with smart phones, the TV applications can be supplied with a device or installed from a directory. The mass media and promotional publications often dub such an approach as "Smart TV" or, less frequently, "Connected TV" or "Hybrid TV". We believe that this trend is mostly neglected today by the developer community. It is little written and spoken about, but at the same time, it offers tremendous opportunities to attract that part of the audience which is poorly or even not yet covered by the ubiquity of computer and smart phone technology. In particular, for applications designed to deliver video content, the television video platforms are a natural environment, and they should be given the same attention as the mobile applications. Continue reading
Every day, more Connected TVs emerge, so it is a high time to consider delivering your content right to your user bedroom. Doing this is pretty easy, you just need to develop a proper application. However at this time, the development process is different for each TV brand, which somewhat complicates the issue. Today, we will brief you on application development for Samsung SmartTV. Continue reading
Following our latest review of the features of Wowza Media Server, let’s now look at how to transcode video streams using this plugin. This feature is helpful when you only have a single source of high quality video and you would like to deliver the video to multiple devices. Yet another example is video stream failback to audio only in an iOS application (AppStore’s requirement), where you need an additional stream with cut-off video. A typical approach to this problem requires a transcoder (you can also generate an audio only stream using the new Adobe Media Server 5.0). Usually, a transcoder is a separate server optimized for video handling. Wowza offers an alternative: transcoding at the media server level. Let’s look at how it works in more detail. Continue reading
We are happy to report that, a new release has been published of the two main Adobe products that you need to build a professional Over The Top (OTT) service. Adobe Media Server Professional 5 is a media server required for pre-processing and delivery of content to a broad range of devices. Adobe Access 4 is a content protection server, now enhanced with support for iOS devices. This way, Adobe has solved the issues of cross-platform delivery of premium content to most of today’s popular devices. In the next posts, we will provide guidelines on migrating and configuring of new releases. But for now, let’s look at some of the technical features of the new products. Continue reading
Wowza Media Server 3.1 is a popular media server to enable live streaming and VOD content delivery. Wowza Media Server’s major benefit is that it supports a variety of media formats. In this post, we will discuss how to enable live streaming using Wowza. Continue reading
If you offer online video services, no doubt you have not once thought of video views analytics. In a Flash-based OSMF framework, there is GTrackPlugin to collect statistics on content viewing. Also, you can also use our OSMF Video Analytics.
However, if your service HTML5 based, you need a purpose designed viewing analytics. To build such a plugin, HTML5 Media API should be used. For more on this API, read this post on HTML5 player implementation. Continue reading
Year by year, we become more involved with media technology than ever before. The World Wide Web is also sensitive to this trend as shown by immense success and popularity of online video services, such as YouTube. However, you cannot run such systems without the technology for video content playback at the end user level.
A classical approach is to build a video player with Flash. Probably you can hardly find a more popular Web browser plugin than Flash Player today. However, a weakness of this approach is the necessity to install the Flash plugin, missing from many devices by default. For example, whatsoever popular iPhone and iPad are, they cannot run Flash applications from within the browser. The way out of this situation is to use HTML5. Continue reading