A Polystyrene Head in the Cloud
Final year students were helped to setup their own cloud-based video streaming service this afternoon by Mux’s Solutions Engineer James Williams.
Students from two modules ‘Media Communications and Networking’ and ‘Broadcast Distribution Technologies’ learnt about streaming technologies from 2014 BSc (Hons) Media Technology graduate James. Since graduating, James has worked on a number of IP-based video platforms, within a variety of companies including Arqiva, Amazon and Mux. He took the students though the protocols commonly used as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
Having taught the basics, James then got the students to experience the stages of the process first-hand by guiding them through building a cloud-based distribution system. They started off with an SDI feed from within the University’s broadcast lab, which was ingested into a local server and encapsulated in Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) using Adobe Flash Media Encoder. They then provisioned a Unix server within Amazon’s EC2 cloud to run NGINX; this accepted the RTMP stream from our local sever and segmented and packaged it for distribution using HTTP Live Streaming. They were then able to open the live stream from a web-browser on any Internet-connected device. We were able to send any feeds from the broadcast lab and a brief wave in front of a camera suggested an end-to-end latency of about 15 seconds.
In addition to seeing how to stream video, the students learnt a number of wider skills such as how to provision virtual servers in the cloud, how to configure firewalls to allow through the control and video traffic, how to use the Secure Shell (SSH) to remote into equipment, as well using the Command Line Interface (CLI) on Unix to install and run applications. It was interesting to be able to view the manifests exchanged by the streaming protocols and see it happening via the web browser’s debugger.
Many thanks to James for giving up his time and to Mux for releasing him for the day and providing cloud resource. Video distribution technologies are evolving rapidly and its great to be able to show students contemporary practice with real-world insights. We’ll be building on the concepts explored today as the module delves deeper into the communications systems used within the industry. Demonstrations really help to put the theory into context and ultimately provide student with a better understanding.
