once we fix caching and improve the nginx locations I'll make sure to release under github.com/nytimes but you'll see that there's no much going on over there, just some config files and the lua app. :)
If you look at the thumbnails extractor, it calls libav methods that are essentially the core of ffmpeg. One of goal of this service is so journalists and editors can easily play and create thumbnails without command lines and terminals :)
hey! VHS is actually a tribute to the old "Video Home System" :) We also name our releases with 80s movies, here are some examples of the latest versions:
- 2.63.0 Coming to America
- 2.60.0 The Terminator
- 2.59.0 Full Metal Jacket
On the beginning of this year we decided to transcode our old videos to have mp4/webm/hls renditions (we only had .flv at that time) so we could also generate the thumbs. For new videos I created this project https://github.com/flavioribeiro/video-thumbnail-generator and we are integrating it with our encoding pipeline.
Just adding one extra information, building the playlist on our side enabled us to define the DVR window (how many time one can seek back on the video). Since we built both the server and client side, it was also possible to add tags to the stream and we did it. tl;dr; It was possible to control the adaptive streaming on the server side.
When our CDN was very crowded, one tag on the HLS playlist was able to direct users to a lower quality, preventing all the users to fight for the same bandwidth and avoiding rebuffering events.
