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. Standard Contribution Workflow

This is an essential part on how our Special Video-Dev Team operates with our customers code base. Mentor for this section is Jonas Rydholm Birmé.

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. Working with Containerized Applications

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 Rydholm Birmé.

2.1 Install Docker Engine

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/

2.2 Setup and Orchestrate a simple Media Function

The portability and reproducibility of a containerized process mean we have an opportunity to move and scale our containerized applications across clouds and datacenters; containers effectively guarantee that those applications will run the same way anywhere, allowing us to quickly and easily take advantage of all these environments. Furthermore, as we scale our applications up, we’ll want some tooling to help automate the maintenance of those applications, able to replace failed containers automatically and manage the rollout of updates and reconfigurations of those containers during their lifecycle.

Tools to manage, scale, and maintain containerized applications are called orchestrators, and the most common examples of these are Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. Development environment deployments of both of these orchestrators are provided by Docker Desktop, which we’ll use throughout this guide to create our first orchestrated, containerized application.

Enable and starta a Kubernetes single-node cluster on your computer that will run an example of a Media Function that you can read more about here: https://medium.com/@eyevinntechnology/building-serverless-media-functions-61bfc400af20

Your task is then to create a Kubernetes pod.yaml that will create a pod with this single function-probe container. Verify that it is up and running:

$ kubectl get pods
NAME             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
function-probe   1/1     Running   0          5s

and to try it out create a port-forwarding:

$ kubectl port-forward function-probe 8080:8080

and then point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and if everything works correctly the API documentation for this media function will be shown.

3. Basic knowledge in NodeJS

Many applications are based on NodeJS backends and even though it may not be the main language of choice it is good to have basic knowledge in working with Javascript and async patterns. Mentor for this section is Benjamin Wallberg.

3.1. Javascript and Promises

3.2. Async/Await

3.3. Build a simple API with NodeJS

4. Contribute to our Channel Engine project

Check out our Channel Engine project https://github.com/Eyevinn/channel-engine and get an understanding of what it does by reading https://medium.com/@eyevinntechnology/server-less-ott-only-playout-bc5a7f2e6d04. Clone the repository and get it up and running locally on your computer. Once you have understood the structure of the code it is time for you to make a contribution to the project. Ask Jonas Rydholm Birmé for a relevant task.

5. Create an iOS application (for Mac/iOS users)

Even though you are not a main iOS developer it is good to have an understanding on the iOS/Xcode development framework. This section can be skipped if you are an experienced iOS developer. Mentor for this section is TBD.

5.1. Build a simple Video Player application

Create an iOS application with a table view containing a list of HLS streams. Test streams are available in Apple developer documentation. When clicking on a cell in the view the video is played and you can control it with simple controllers to pause and scrub backward / forward on a timeline.

5.2. Low-latency Support

Add support for low-latency playback in the application you built in 5.1

6. Make a contribution to the community

Browse through Github to find a relevant repository / project in the video streaming area which you can contribute to. When you have found the project to contribute to then:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create topic branch
3. Implement feature
4. Issue pull request

Congratulations! You have now made your (first) contribution to the video streaming open source community.

7. 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.

7.1 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.

7.2 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.