Welcome

First of all Hello!, we are happy to welcome you as new developer and consultant at Eyevinn Technology. The purpose with the following tasks is to get you quickly on-board to be able to contribute to the company and the video streaming open source community.

Our manifesto is that whenever we have the possibility to release our code as open source we should. Source code under non-disclosure agreement and where the intellectual property belongs to our customers are of course not released.

Read through these tasks and you can skip the tasks that you are already quite familiar with. Every task has a named person to who you in first hand can address questions to.

1. Working with GitHub

We are using GitHub as the main code space for source code that we maintain and are responsible for.

1.1 Create a Github account

If you don't already have a Github account create an account by following the instructions here: https://help.github.com/articles/signing-up-for-a-new-github-account/

We require that you enable two-factor authentication

You can find more info on choosing your 2FA account here

Once your account has been created send the username you have chosen to Jonas Birmé on Slack or E-mail who will then add you to our organization on Github. If you are totally new to Git or Github we recommend you to take the time and read through the articles here: https://help.github.com/articles/good-resources-for-learning-git-and-github/

1.2 Fork this onboarding repository

Now you should be quite comfortable with Git and Github and ready to contribute. Begin with creating a fork of this onboarding repository: https://github.com/Eyevinn/onboarding-tasks

Instructions on how to fork a repository can be found here: https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/

Find something you want to modify with this text. When you have decided what you want to do, continue with next steps.

1.3 Create a topic branch

Create a topic branch in your forked repository for the modifications that you decided to do. Instructions on how to create a topic branch can be found here: https://help.github.com/articles/creating-and-deleting-branches-within-your-repository/

1.4 Issue a pull request

In your topic branch implement the feature and verify it works. Then issue a pull request, and instructions on how to do that can be found here: https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request/

Your pull request will then be reviewed and if everything looks good it will be merged upstreams. Congratulations!

2. Create your own video streaming application

The goal of this task is to build your own video streaming application using the open web services available in Eyevinn Open Source Cloud. Login to Eyevinn OSC using your Eyevinn email address and choose the "Eyevinn Lab Account" tenant. If that selection is not visible on the list of available tenants reach out to Jonas Birmé.

Mentor for this section is Jonas Birmé.

2.1 Create a streaming video file

First step is to create an streaming video file that you will use. Record a video using for example your mobile phone and transfer it to your computer. Follow the instructions in the blog post Stream video with open web services to setup a video processing pipeline and process the video you recorded.

2.2 Create a web video application

Next step is to create a web application to playback the video stream you created. Follow the steps in the blog post Creating a web video application. Make the web video application available online as described in the blog post but replace the site name video with something of your choice. Send the URL to your site to the mentor of this section.

2.3 Create a video backend for the application

Next step is to create a backend to manage the video assets you have created in 2.1. Setup a NoSQL document database as described in the blog post NoSQL Key-Value database with open web services and the CouchDB OSC documentation. Then add a document for the video asset you created including the playback URL.

Then modify the web application in 2.2 to read from the database and get the video asset you created and replace the hard-coded playback URL.

2.4 Create a virtual TV channel

Next step is to create a virtual TV channel based on the video assets in the video backend you created in 2.3. Create a webhook as described in step 2 in the virtual channels documentation but instead of a hard-coded playback URL use a playbackURL from the video backend. If you have multiple video assets you can return one at random. Deploy this webhook using the web runner in Eyevinn Open Source Cloud.

Then create a virtual channel using the FAST Channel Engine in Eyevinn OSC. Create channel of type webhook and provide the URL to the webhook that you deployed using the web runner above. Send the playback URL to the virtual channel to the mentor of this section.

Now modify the web application and add a player that plays this virtual channel you created.

3. Install Docker Engine

It is today common to work with containerized applications as part of a micro service architecture style. It is essential to have the basic knowledge in how to work with for example Docker containers. Mentor for this section is Jonas Birmé.

Install Docker Engine on your computer. Docker Engine is an open source containerization technology for building and containerizing your applications. Docker Engine is available on a variety of Linux platforms, Mac and Windows through Docker Desktop, Windows Server, and as a static binary installation. Docker is a platform for developers and sysadmins to build, share, and run applications with containers. The use of containers to deploy applications is called containerization. Containers are not new, but their use for easily deploying applications is.

If you are new to the concept of Docker take the time and read more about it here: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/

4. FFMPEG (optional)

When working with media processing, you may want to experiment with some aspects on your local machine. For example, you may want to investigate how different encoder parameters affect the quality of the final output. FFMPEG is an open source media toolkit that handles pretty much everything you throw at it. In this section, we'll discuss how to install FFMPEG, and use it to transcode a video.

4.1 Installing FFMPEG

macOS

The easiest way of installing the latest version of FFMPEG on macOS is to use homebrew. If you have homebrew installed, simply enter

brew install ffmpeg

into your terminal.

Windows

If you're using windows, FFMPEG builds are available for download on the FFMPEG download page.

Linux

If using a debian-based linux distro, entering

apt-get install ffmpeg

into your terminal will install FFMPEG on your system.

Note: custom builds

Depending on your use case, you may need to build FFMPEG from source. The source code is available on the FFMPEG download page.

4.2 Transcoding a video

Now that FFMPEG is isntalled on your system, let's transcode a video. Start by verifying that FFMPEG is installed by entering

ffmpeg -version

into your terminal. You should see the version installed on your computer, as well as the configuration used for compiling it.

Now, let's transcode a video! We'll use Big buck bunny as our content, since it's free to use ad open source. To download the video, enter

curl -o bunny.mp4 http://distribution.bbb3d.renderfarming.net/video/mp4/bbb_sunflower_1080p_30fps_normal.mp4

The video is encoded using h.264 and packaged into an MP4; we'll transcode it to instead use VP9, and package it using a webm container. We'll also need to transcode the audio to use OGG vorbis. To do this, enter the following command into your terminal:

ffmpeg -i bunny.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -c:a libvorbis bunny.webm

This tells FFMEG to transcode the input bunny.mp4 using the libvpx-vp9 VP9 implementation for the video, and libvorbis Vorbis encoder, and write the output to the file bunny.webm.

Congratulations, you've just transcoded a media file using FFMPEG! To learn more about FFMPEG, take a look at the documentation.