Is it possible to determine the number of times a video in Azure Media Services has been requested/streamed via it's published URL.
Thanks
Anthony
That depends on whether you use a CDN in front of the streaming unit. If so, you can only track viewing numbers via CDN. Our Azure CDN offers that capability. We don't track viewing numbers on streaming unit at the moment. Another option is to track on your client devices. Usually there are monitoring framework built in for players.
Cheers,
Mingfei yan
Related
Can I use Azure Media Services as an 1-1 video chat?This would be something like skype/Discord or Teams
Your idea will not work.
The purpose of Azure Media Services is to securely deliver on-demand and live video or audio streams that scale to millions of users.
In addition, Azure Media services will have 30-40 seconds delays between video captured and moment it streamed through published channel. Unable to meet your requirements, you can view Skype related technical information.
For more details, you can see the post. Skype like application on Microsoft Azure Media Services
We are very small junior school private tutors have setup of an online portal where students can login and watch the daily video lectures. We have many videos uploaded to Azure media services but we realized the encoding cost is high and not affordable. So I encoded a video using FFMPEG and generated m4s and audio file and .mpd (metadata) using MPBox in my local.
I have copied all the files on Azure blob storage and blob storage have HTTPS access. Can I use .mpd as source url for Azure media player ?
e.g. Azure media player source is //amssamples.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net/3b970ae0-39d5-44bd-b3a3-3136143d6435/AzureMediaServicesPromo.ism/manifest
but my generated metadata from MPDBox is
https://bb.sourceoftraining.companywebinternet.storage/ssj-ewrrer-2343s-ssssdf23/process_and_benifits.mpd
Or any other player I can use. I tried Shaka player but unable to show the Resolution and Playback speed settings.
Uploading pre-encoded MP4's works just fine. I suggest you download the latest version of the Azure Media Explorer tool for the v3 API. In there you can now upload an MP4 into a new asset, and have it generate the client and server manifests needed for streaming. Just upload to a new empty Asset, and then double click on the asset to get to the tab for the files, and click the generate manifests buttons.
That pre-gens the required manifest files needed for streaming an MP4 that is pre-encoded with closed 2 second GOPs. The tool pre-generates both the client and server manifest and saves them back into the asset to improve the playback performance from the streaming server.
You can use Azure Media Player to play back DASH, Smooth, or HLS - but the technology that it chooses to use for playback differs by platform. For example depending on the browser version, OS, or mobile client it will chose to load a different player tech or it will use the built-in OS player support.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/azure-media-player/azure-media-player-overview
For DASH content (.mpd) the AMP player chooses to use Dash on Windows, and on Android in specific conditions. It does this by detecting the platform and using the right tech combined with the /manifest(format=mpd-time-cmaf) format on the URL. You can learn more about how "dynamic packaging" works in AMS here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/latest/dynamic-packaging-overview
There are various "format" options on the streaming locator URL in AMS that provide different manifest formats back.
Smooth Streaming = /manifest
MPEG-DASH-CMAF = /manifest(format=mpd-time-cmaf)
HLS with CMAF = manifest(format=m3u8-cmaf)
HLS v3 (TS) = /manifest(format=m3u8-aapl-v3)
Using one of those various formats, you can use any 3rd party player that supports them. Shaka, HLS.js, Exoplayer on Android, iOS AvFoundation native player, Video.js, or even the 'adpater-player' noted by Jason above. Any player that supports the current HLS or DASH specifications should work.
If you have School email addresses that you can use for yourself and your students the simplest solution would be to leverage capabilities from Microsoft Stream via the free O365 education plan - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans. Info on Microsoft Stream at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-stream.
And to clarify feedback Jason Pan just provided, while Azure Media Player doesn't support just pointing at .mpd file for playback this is rather done via first creating appropriate server manifest and then requesting .mpd manifest via format option in the URL clients will use to request content. Media Services will then dynamically create the appropriate manifest to respond to the client request. See John's response for links to articles with additional feedback on this.
If you use Shaka Player's UI library, you'll be able to display the Resolution and Playback speed settings.
Shaka UI library Shaka Player Demo
I have been searching for an API service that allows for browser based video capturing and encoding for the purpose of live streaming. The company I work for needs an "all inclusive" API but it does not seem to exist. The closest we have come to are streaming services that allow for a player to be embedded and the stream output to be linked to that player. These services always seem to require that you use a separate software to encode your live video.
Are there copyrights held by YouTube and Vimeo that prevent others from creating these technologies? Are there limitations with cost and scale?
Live streaming is typically broken down into to categories:
Video conferencing where where is a limited number of participants. Here video quality typically doesn't matter. This is what browser based broadcasting solutions are designed for.
Second is large audience; where there is a single broadcaster with many viewers. Here separate encoding software is preferred because they are much more feature rich, allow for more options and controls, and allow for using good quality cameras.
COVID-19 made popular new categories of a broadcasted conference calls and simple "one too many" broadcasts from a laptops.
Not many companies have built an end to end services for this use case as significant demand for them has only existed for a few months, and it takes years to build something like this. When Covid is over this market may dry up again.
Qs: API service that allows for browser based video capturing and encoding for the purpose of live streaming:
WebRTC
Qs: Streaming player to be embedded and the stream output:
HLS/DASH Player on Any Standard Browser
You can have a Media Gateway to convert from Webrtc to HLS/DASH (one to many or broadcasting scenario):
Janus
Here is a diagram to illustrate the same
I am trying to create a web server(REST APIs), which should be able to store, organise and stream videos for a client request.
My confusion:
How should a user can upload videos. From research, I decided that I would store all the metadata for the videos in database(google datastore), and all the video files in separate storage(Google cloud storage). Now, to upload videos, what is the proper way?
Once a video is uploaded and stored, how will the streaming will happen. Suppose a user make a request to watch a video, server will get a http request for that. But how to stream videos? Is there any service for this? Because using http streaming directly in code affects performance I guess.
From my understanding, I want to use a service which should be able to stream videos from my storage to a client upon the server's request. I guessed the server should make request to this "video streaming service" only after verifying the user credentials.
For question 1 (how to enable customers to upload objects), signed URLs are a good bet.
Question 2 is a lot bigger. Depending on your needs you could simply point clients to GCS video files, but modern media serving is a bit more advanced than that. You may want to look into using GCE with a streaming video service, for example something like Wowza. Google offers a click-to-deploy experience for it: http://cloud.google.com/tryitnow/wowza
(Keep in mind that Wowza is a separate products requiring a paid license. I don't have any experience with it and neither advocate for nor disapprove of it).
My partner and I have a webcam site that basically runs the old-school method....Every 0.5 seconds the javascript reloads the image in the browser from the webcam. However we are wanting to upgrade to a streaming media server to get higher quality video, and possibly audio. We aren't tied to any one specific file format or server type, as of right now we are leaning towards slicehost (as scalability is important), and installing darwin streaming server or wowza.
This is meant to be a live stream. Does anyone have any suggestions for hosts/server software?
Wowza is great and they offer an Amazon EC2 setup with micro pricing to make it affordable.
You can always go with Flash Media Server, but that is expensive.
Red5 is free and open source.
UPDATE
Based on your comment, you can also use UStream. It is free and will hook into Flash Encoder, which is also free.
Do you absolutely have to stand up your own streaming server? Services like LiveStream can do what you're talking about for much cheaper than setting up your own hardware.