How we implemented the video player in Mail.Ru Cloud

We’ve recently added video streaming service to Mail.Ru Cloud. Development started with contemplating the new feature as an all-purpose “Swiss Army knife” that would both play files of any format and work on any device with the Cloud available. Video content uploaded to the Cloud mostly falls into one of the two categories: “movies/series” and “users’ videos”. The latter are the videos that users shoot with their phones and cameras, and these videos are most versatile in terms of formats and codecs. For many reasons, it is often a problem to watch these videos on other end-user devices without prior normalization: a required codec is missing, or the file size is too big to download, or whatever.

In this article, I’ll go into detail to explain how video playback works in Mail.Ru Cloud, and how we made the Cloud player “omnivorous” and ensured support on a maximum number of end-user devices.

Storing and Caching: two approaches

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Live Video Streaming At Facebook Scale

With 1.49 billion monthly active users, operating at Facebook scale is far from trivial. Facebook's new live video streaming services present a fascinating use case for designing streaming service in global distribution and massive scale.

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Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!

Computing pioneer Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler, searched for a concrete way to create an intuitive understanding of just how fast is a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, which was the speed of their new computer circuits. As an illustration she settled on the length of wire that is as long as light can travel in one nanosecond. The length is a very portable 11.8 inches. A microseconds worth of wire is a still portable, but a much bulkier 984 feet. In one millisecond light travels 186 miles, which only Hercules could carry. In today's terms, at a 3.06 GHz clock speed, there's .33 nanoseconds between ticks, or 3.73 inches of light travel.

Understanding the profligate ways of programmers, she suggests that every programmer wear a necklace of a microseconds worth of wire so they know what they are wasting when they throw away microseconds. And if a General is busting your chops about satellite messages taking too long to send, you can bust out your piece of wire and explain there's a lot of nanoseconds between here and there.

Here's a short, witty, and wise video of her famous nanosecond demonstration. An amazing lady, great innovator, an engaging speaker, and an inspiring teacher.

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Paper: An Experimental Investigation of the Akamai Adaptive Video Streaming

Video is hot on the Internet and people are really interested in knowing how to make it work. Dan Rayburn has a post pointing to a fascinating paper: An Experimental Investigation of the Akamai Adaptive Video Streaming, which talks in some detail about the protocols big players like YouTube, Skype and Akamai use to serve video over on an inherently video unfriendly medium like the Internet. For Akamai they found:

1. Each video is encoded in five versions at different bit rates and stored in separate files.
2. The client sends commands to the server with an average inter departure time of about 2 s, i.e. the control algorithm is executed on average each 2 seconds. 
3. Akamai uses only the video level to adapt the video source to the available bandwidth, whereas the frame rate of the video is kept constant.
4. When a sudden drop in the available bandwidth occurs, short interruptions of the video playback can occur due to the a large actuation delay.
5. For a sudden increase of the available bandwidth, the transient time to match the new bandwidth is roughly 150 seconds.

Abstract:

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Video: Storage in the Cloud at Joyent

Ben Rockwood of Joyent speaks on "Storage in the Cloud" at the first OpenSolaris Storage Summit. Ben is the Director of Systems at Joyent. The Joyent Accelerators are based on OpenSolaris and ZFS. He has deep experience with OpenSolaris in the Real World.

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High Definition Video Delivery on the Web?

How would you architect and implement an SD and HD internet video delivery system such as the BBC iPlayer or Recast Digital's RDV1. What do you need to consider on top of the Lessons Learned section in the YouTube Architecture post? How is it possible to compete with the big players like Google? Can you just use a CDN and scale efficiently? Would Amazon's cloud services be a viable platform for high-definition video streaming?

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Streaming Video on Amazon EC2?

An Amazon EC2 Flash Video Streaming solution has been announced by Wowza Media. What do you think about the future of similar solutions? Is Amazon EC2 and S3 ready for video streaming? I have found threads on their forums related to the performance, scalability and high availability of the hosted streaming solution. How would you make it scalable? Is it really cheaper than traditional hosting? Looking forward to your thoughts!

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