December 2020 Summaries

In 2020, Mux released several new features including Closed Captions in Mux Video, storyboards, CDN redundant live streams, and more. They also made significant improvements to Mux Data with advanced filtering, real-time APIs, and custom alerting systems. Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, Mux adapted to remote work and experienced substantial growth in terms of team size and video delivery. Looking forward to 2021, Mux aims to launch new products, double their team again, implement Low Latency live streaming, return to some level of office presence while maintaining a remote-equal policy, and continue growing to better serve the video industry.

Mux now supports setting the DEFAULT flag to "YES" on caption or subtitle tracks through playback modifiers that can be added to the manifest URL. This feature only affects manifests and works with all existing assets. Most players handle this automatically so long as autoplay is enabled and the track has DEFAULT set to "YES". Mux also accepts BCP-47 language codes for selecting a default subtitle language, trying to find the closest match if an exact match on the asset is not available.

Mux Video has introduced a new feature that captures "epoch time" for each frame received and includes it in the HLS Manifest as EXT-X-PROGRAM-DATE-TIME. This feature, previously in closed beta, is now available in open beta for interested developers before being offered out-of-the-box with Mux Video APIs. The Program Date Time feature helps synchronize live streams with other components on a webpage and enables co-viewing experiences without spoilers. Developers can sign up to test the feature during the open beta, which will not cost extra.

Mux has observed an increasing demand for access to raw and enriched video QoS data processed by Mux Data. To meet this need, they have made real-time metric and event-stream exports available for their Enterprise customers. These exports enable various applications such as monitoring CDN performance, identifying viral videos, and joining metrics with internal metrics for faster troubleshooting. Mux uses Apache Kafka as its internal streaming platform and has chosen to use the open-source software Kafka Connect to manage real-time event-stream exports to external streaming services. In production, Kafka Connect has proven to be reliable, scalable, and easy to extend and customize. To get started with Kafka Connect, users can follow a three-step process: build their Kafka Connect Docker image, start up the Kafka Connect cluster, and run connectors. Lessons learned from using Kafka Connect include setting the 'CONNECT_REST_ADVERTISED_HOST_NAME' environment variable, configuring the 'errors.retry.timeout' value on sinks, and being cautious when implementing autoscaling for Kafka consumers. Monitoring is crucial for managing Kafka Connect resources effectively, and Mux uses Grafana to visualize Prometheus metrics such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, topic consumer lag, records consumed by connectors, sink batch average put-time, task errors, and task failures. Alerts are set up on key metrics like CPU utilization, memory utilization, and Kafka consumer fetch-record lag to ensure optimal performance.

The text discusses enabling mobile live streaming for a React Native app using Mux, an industry-standard protocol. It mentions the react-native-nodemediaclient library as a broadcasting client but notes that any RTMP-capable library can be used. The process involves creating a new live stream within Mux and acquiring the Playback ID and Stream Key. The text also provides sample code snippets for configuring the broadcast client and implementing a UI to start and stop live streaming. It emphasizes the importance of considering factors such as video quality, bitrate, and available upload bandwidth when live streaming from mobile devices.

The text discusses how Mux, an online video platform, handles live streaming issues such as network failures and disconnections. It explains the concept of reconnect windows that allow seamless resumption of content if a stream is interrupted but not terminated. However, it also highlights the challenges associated with intentional stream termination, which can be mistaken for network failure. The text provides three solutions to this problem: fading to black or running an end screen slate, using Mux API's signalComplete function, and enabling reduced latency mode to opt out of reconnect windows entirely. Each solution has its own trade-offs that need to be considered based on the specific requirements of a project.

This blog post discusses the production process behind Demuxed 2020, an online conference that took place due to COVID-19 restrictions. The author highlights the pre-production work, including designing a unique look for the event and preparing the talks in advance. They also detail the technical setup used during the live broadcast, such as using vMix for mixing audio and video feeds, titling, and data-driven run of show. Additionally, they share their experience with Q&A sessions and lightning talks, which were conducted through a platform called vMix Call. The author concludes by discussing some technical issues faced during the event and how they were resolved.