Mux Blog

Surprised nobody mentioned Mux yet, who are really great at providing a video platform for all sorts of apps and businesses: https://mux.com/

We actually built How Video Works as a side project at Mux [1] (inspired by How DNS Works [2]) - there's a note about it at the top of the page. We have contributions from our own team as well as others in the industry. Our main motivation is to try to educate on the complexities and intracies of streaming video. Despite streaming video representing 80+% of the internet, it's all underpinned by a fairly small community of engineers, which we're eager to help grow through tools like this, and the Demuxed community [3]. Edit: I should also mention that Leandro was kind enough to adapt a this content from his amazing Digital Video Introduction [4] [1] https://mux.com/ [2] https://howdns.works/ [3] https://2021.demuxed.com/ [4] https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction

> I was expecting a video streaming CDN so anyone could build a Youtube/Twitch competitor without having to deal with storing, transcoding and (live)streaming video. I vaguely remember AWS offering something like this. Not sure how much money there is in this market but definitely sounds like a great product fit for someone like Cloudflare. There's Cloudflare-stream[1] and also Mux[2] [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ [2] https://mux.com/

I'm actually working on a blog post on the state of streaming live from a browser! WebRTC is...a bit of a monster, especially if you want to broadcast one-to-many. I've been hacking around with using the MediaRecorder API and piping that through WebSockets to a server that publishes via RTMP. It's definitely rough, and browsers de-prioritizing requestAnimationFrame callbacks when the tab isn't in focus kills things, but it's promising. It runs shockingly well on a Glitch instance for what that's worth. You need a Mux (https://mux.com) stream key for the demo, but you could quickly edit it to use any RTMP URL: https://mmcc-next-streamr.glitch.me/

Video is the sort of thing that benefits significantly from economies of scale. Encoding and bandwidth costs are your two biggest factors. Encoding has to be done once -- well, once per rendition you ship, more on that in a second -- but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts, very linear, and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item. Those bandwidth costs typically depend on your desired quality of video (bitrate) and capacity of service. CDNs and traditional cloud services tend to have expensive outbound bandwidth. VPSes etc. don't, but it's not fast enough to serve many users, and what happens when you hit transfer limits is Not Great. It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files". HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.) This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a shameless plug; I work on the devex team)…

I could go pretty deep here, so let me know if I should elaborate on anything. The backend is a Ruby on Rails application that serves the frontend app's API. This interfaces with the user tables, database, and handles all the "state" of the app. The serverless stuff has changed over the months, but primarily it handles the stuff I don't want Rails to handle: file uploads, video processing and transcription. First, huge props to the Mux (https://mux.com) team and product. I can not express how easy it has been to build video (and audio) products. File uploads are handled to AWS/GCP (depending on a few things) and then trigger a serverless callback to Mux.com. Mux was the fastest way we found to turn an arbitrary video file (mp4/mov/etc) into HLS format for quick streaming. Then once the video is uploaded, we have another serverless callback that sends the video for transcription using Assembly AI (https://assemblyai.com). There are a ton of transcription based services and they vary dramatically in quality, based on the media content. I believe Google/Amazon services were largely built around the need to process phone calls, so unless you may for their "enhanced" models, the quality is surprisingly bad (and surprisingly slow). I *highly highly* recommend Mux and Assembly AI if you are doing anything video/transcription based work. To get an immediate update to the end user, we actually process two transcript requests - one that is just the first 60 seconds, and then the…

Mux (https://mux.com) | San Francisco | Front-End Developer | Full-time | Onsite Mux is building the future of online video infrastructure. Our first product is analytics and monitoring - think “NewRelic for Video”. We’re solving a real need in a fast-growing industry, and customers love our product: we’re monitoring hundreds of millions of video streams for companies like PBS, Funny or Die, IGN, and Wistia, and we’re just getting started. As a front-end engineer at Mux, you will build and expand our React/Redux front-end application, our Elixir (Phoenix) APIs, and our JavaScript video player SDKs. We’re looking for a strong engineer with solid fundamentals, who can work quickly on a small team to deliver new features and products to our customers. You’ll be joining an amazing team from places like Google, Facebook, Twitch, Brightcove, and Bain. Our founders previously started (and sold) Zencoder, an early leader in cloud video technology. We also authored Video.js, the biggest HTML5 video player on the web. We were named one of the best Y Combinator startups of 2016, and are funded by SV Angel, Lowercase (Chris Sacca), the founders of Heroku, Parse, and other top-tier investors. https://muxhq.workable.com/jobs/398415

Madness is the right word. The situation is mad, and you'll drive yourself mad trying to get things to "look right." I hate this situation because all the hardware available now is great, but none of the software works properly together. And of course, it looks great on your hardware calibrated HDR OLED display with every piece of software using the correct color profiles, but then it looks like a turd on grandma's Windows 7 PC. Don't even read this or it's straight to the asylum: https://www.mux.com/blog/your-browser-and-my-browser-see-different-col…

Here are a couple resources which may be helpful: - https://www.mux.com/video-glossary - https://howvideo.works/ Also, if you do want to take the time to read a longer and denser article, but come away with an understanding of much of the breadth of modern streaming tech, there's a really great survey paper available in pre-print here: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.03256

This could be an interesting competitor to Mux (https://mux.com/)

Most of the time, we work on processing video data after it's been hosted somewhere for us to seek by frame or download. We don't yet support video streams but have heard multiple people bring it up. Our infrastructure is really good at filtering for parts of video where things are happening ("interesting") and being able to parallelize video processing by cutting it up into multiple pieces, running more granular models on those parts, and smoothly interpolating metadata using surrounding frames. You should check out the processing section of our FAQ page (linked in original comment) for a more detailed explanation of how our processing works. If you're worried about just streaming seamlessly, Mux has a great solution: https://mux.com/live. Also, for detecting things in e-sports feeds, feel free to reach out to the email in my bio!

Nothing against Vimeo, but was Mux (https://mux.com - YCW16) also a consideration?

Cloudflare is comparable to https://mux.com/, not Vimeo. Vimeo's embed settings are supposed to be directly used by marketing teams, not developers.

My usecase involves sharing private video with access control for my sports club. For that I use https://mux.com/ which take care of hosting, CDN and all the conversion shenanigans. On top of that I've build a Django app which uses video.js as a player.

Exactly, reliably streaming video is much more complicated and expensive than given credit for. YouTube being $0 does not actually mean it's free, it just means the creator/publisher isn't paying for it directly in money, but in skimmed traffic. The viewer pays by exchanging personal data on what they watch and are interested in, as well as their time in watching commercials. All of these costs are much higher than anyone actually estimates as people incorrectly valued them while YouTube arbitrages the real value in this. We created an alternative to YouTube for those who have discovered the real value of these costs at Swarmify[1], but there are other options as well depending on needs/wants.[2][3] [1] https://swarmify.com/ - No code/low code easy YouTube migration option [2] https://mux.com/ - API based option [3] https://vdocipher.com/ - Enterprise DRM option

> As of 2012, videos that didn’t load in two seconds had little hope of going viral. This finding aligns with the results of a survey of users of the Mux video analytics service. We asked them "Which of the following streaming video problems is the most frustrating for you when it occurs?" Video rebuffering or stalled playback was considered the most annoying problem for 47% of respondents; video picture quality was chosen by only 14.3%. Slow startup times and rebuffering have a huge impact on the perceived QoE compared to video picture quality. https://mux.com/blog/rebuffering-the-most-frustrating-and-frequent-pro…

Publishing is usually not the issue. The delivery is. Besides being it very expensive to re-encode, store and delivery content (in comparison to text), it's incredibly challenging to create good experience for the end user. This is where companies like mux [0] come in the picture, but it's a paid product. YouTube is "free" with a chance to also generate, in some cases, pretty significant revenue stream. [0] https://mux.com

Hi there - Jon from Mux here. We've been working hard on this product for the last 6 months and are excited to open it up. Try it out and we'd love feedback. Free to start. As background, here are a few blog posts about what we're doing and why. Video is too hard - https://mux.com/blog/video-is-too-hard/ An API to Video: Why Abstraction Matters - https://mux.com/blog/an-api-to-video-why-abstraction-matters/

This was a great article about charts in React: https://mux.com/blog/so-we-redid-our-charts-part-ii-graphing-react-ing…

This is such an elegant summary of why WCs are painful. I wish I had summarized it so well. I'm on the Video.js team and I wrote about my journey on this front as well [1]. [1]: https://www.mux.com/blog/6-years-building-video-players-9-billion-requ…

It looks similar to agent-video, which is also based on agent-browser: https://www.mux.com/blog/agentic-video-screen-recording I don't think you need either, though, because agent-browser itself has a skill for this: https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser/blob/main/skills/agent-br… Maybe the author would like to compare the three.

That's a fair point, especially considering everything else you get with the plan. However, the pricing is still a far cry from non-decentralized solutions (for example, MUX's free plan offers 100K minutes per month [1]) and so the only other selling point is joining the fediverse—which is a good thing, but hard to get people to convert on (in Bluesky's case the turmoil that is now X was required). - [1]: https://mux.com/pricing/video

I would like to know what the costs come out to per minute of video encoded and how many outputs they're getting in order to compare this to something like Media Convert (AWS), Google Transcode or something dedicated like Mux. For reference Google Transcoder is about $0.13 per minute of encoding (at four resolutions). Mux is at $0.032 / min, AWS Media Convert $0.0188. I should note I know Mux's pricing well, use them a lot, happily. It gets a bit confusing with Google and Media Convert because I'm not sure how these costs map to the resulting bitrate renditions that get created and I've not got the time for a deeper dive to get a more straight apples to apples comparison (ignore scale discounts) [1] https://cloud.google.com/transcoder/pricing [2] https://www.mux.com/pricing/video [3] https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/pricing/

Mux, a video API for developers, offers credits and other benefits for startups: https://www.mux.com/startups Disclaimer, I work for Mux.

https://github.com/cannonbeach/ott-packager Then feed that into any CDN which works with HLS, which should be all of them. All CDNs are going to charge based on usage, that's how they work, some offer a free tier but you have to take responsibility for managing your costs and ensuring your revenue scales (otherwise just use YouTube) Alternatively there's also: https://www.mux.com/live

Curious if you considered Mux: https://mux.com/live or IVS: https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/ for your project? If so what made them not compelling options?

Haven’t tried it myself but I believe that some video hosting services provide such functionality. See e.g. https://mux.com/features/#signed-urls

With Mux you can enable "Redundant Streams" (multiple CDN's used in HLS manifest) which I think solves the issue here. We are also a big Mux customer but admittedly haven't made the full switch to redundant streams, although our testing was very promising. Since their ingest is all GCP I don't think that was affected by this, and it would have just been delivery. https://www.mux.com/blog/survive-cdn-failures-with-redundant-streams/

LL-HLS removed HTTP/2 Server Push from the spec back in January: https://mux.com/blog/low-latency-hls-part-2/ This was driven by poor server + client support at large, and the complexity it introduced. LL-HLS instead uses byte ranges and open-ended ranges over HTTP/2 - almost Comet-style - to handle CMAF chunks.

Prices appear to be a bit steep, no? What's your experience? https://mux.com/pricing