Alternative Audio Tracks in HTML5 Video

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simultaneous-video-playback

A major advantage of HTTP Live Streaming, and it is still unbeaten by any other standard, is that you can use any technology to compose multimedia content. You don’t need expensive media servers to handle media streams. You can easily delegate media composition to some simple PHP / Python / Ruby / Node.js modules. As a long-time Flash lover I was somewhat prejudiced against the Apple’s video delivery standard. But as a developer, every day I use it to solve tasks which have been almost unattainable with the previous stack (or required expensive software). Adobe HDS playlists have been really hard to deal with. Just think of binary data in f4m playlists. They require much more time to develop & debug the solution. MPEG DASH is also far from being intuitive.

In this post, we are going to discuss how to make an alternative audio track for your video. Although HTTP Live Streaming can streamline this task, yet there are some limitations, so you need to make certain hacks on the client side. In our Together project, we had to implement alternate sound tracks for user videos. Luckily, we use HTTP Live Streaming throughout the system. Continue reading →

One startup prerelease growth

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startup growth

In this post, I will tell you the story of our early prerelease growth approach we took with Together Video Camera. Nowadays, there are lots of ways to attract early users. We took our path and I believe, we have our say here. I spent days and weeks studying the best existing practices, and after that spent even more so proceeding my way and applying the newly learned principles. So, let’s start and check some of the steps I took and the outcome I have finally got. Continue reading →

Parallax in iOS Applications

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layersParallax

The idea of using the phenomenon of parallax in mobile application design is in no way new. Like many other ideas, parallax was borrowed from the Web design realm, where initially it had been rather popular. Parallax enriches your design with an impressive illusion of depth and space. By now, due to certain encumbrances of Web application development, the fashion for parallax in website design has somewhat subsided. The mobile applications world, however, is quite on the contrary. There the parallax is live and kicking and reluctant to retire. Moreover, it has even become a default home screen in the new iOS 7.

In this post, we are going to tell you of our new DVParallaxView component and show you how to enhance your applications with the parallax effect similar or probably even better than the iOS 7 home screen. Continue reading →

The Art of Core Motion in iOS

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With emergence of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer on iPhone devices, new opportunities have opened up before iOS application developers. However, although their APIs have been announced for several years now, not much on them can be found on the Web today. On the one hand, this topic is really not so vast to dedicate a book or series of posts to it. But on the other hand, there are certain specifics and pitfalls you have to be aware of. This post is intended for developers who are willing to befriend accelerometer and gyroscope in the iPhone. Continue reading →

Playlist Player for iOS

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DVPlaylistPlayer Title

A player is a core part of your video application. If you ever have tried to build a player into your application, you probably know that you need some time to set up and customize it. We would venture to say, that mostly you need a player to run playlists rather than individual videos. In this post, we would like to tell you about our open source component we use to play back videos in our Together project. Please welcome to our playlist player, DVPlaylistPlayer. Continue reading →

How to Design a Video Platform

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video platform architecture

In this post, we are going to dwell on the process of video platform design for our Together project. From the technical viewpoint, this project is remarkable by containing the entire content lifecycle, from its creation on mobile devices to distribution and viewing. While designing the platform, we sought to attain solution flexibility and cost-efficiency. With the new video platform you can receive, store and share videos. All video management tasks were implemented on Apple HLS. Continue reading →

OSMF HLS Plugin

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Having been involved in the Together project, I was assigned a task to enable Apple HLS video playback on the Flash platform. Video content delivery in a single format (HLS in this case) is usually very easy and offers many benefits. To process video, Flash has an open source OSMF framework that can be easily enhanced with various plugins. But there is one problem: the framework is absolutely HLS-agnostic. Adobe promoted RTMP first, and only then offered HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) as an alternative to Apple HLS. In this post, we’ll cover a free HLS plugin that we have developed to run HLS in OSMF-enabled video players. Continue reading →

Bootstrapping: Our Real Life Case Study

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We have to deal with funding in every project, sooner or later. Generally speaking, the question is, whether to create a company with your own capital or money borrowed from venture capitalists, business angels or through equity crowdfunding. You can find lots of information on how to approach investors, on the Web. Commonly, investors are very public people highly involved with social media. We have just recently got into attracting investors, so we are just in the middle of the learning curve. But as soon as we have accumulated enough data, surely we will share it. However, what we can share right now, is our solid long-term experience with bootstrapping our business. You have to face funding issues long before you ever contact with a potential investor. To approach investors you have to make something tangible first. A popular idea today is that the “early stage” means the point of profitability in the project. To get to this stage, often you have to start with your own money. But what to do when your money is limited? Well, the answer is in bootstrapping! Continue reading →

Push Notifications: Tips and Tricks

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push notifications service

Push notifications is a really great mechanism available to all mobile developers (and beyond). With notifications of this type, you can notify users of important events, so that they can respond as quickly as possible, even when the application is not running. Moreover, with this approach you can boost user awareness of your product. In this post, we are going to share our hands-on experience in implementing such functionality in our large-scale projects and provide a number of tips and tricks. Continue reading →