April 2022 Summaries

At React Miami conference, Mux introduced an interactive video guestbook that allowed attendees to record their memories. The idea was to make the booth less about them and more about the visitors. They used MediaStream Recording API for recording and Mux for transcoding videos in the cloud. The guestbook became a great conversation piece and provided a welcome respite from the conference's busy environment.

Mux has redesigned its billing page with the aim of helping customers better understand their usage and avoid unexpected surprises on their bills. The new billing page features more clarity into costs, increased transparency into usage, and better control over billing data. Customers can now see their current plan, estimated usage for the remainder of the billing period, and download invoices in CSV format. Mux is seeking feedback from customers to further improve its billing system.

Mux has adopted the use of the Envoy networking proxy within their Kubernetes clusters for handling gRPC interservice traffic. They chose this approach over client-based and full service-mesh solutions due to its language agnosticism, compatibility with older Kubernetes versions, and rich feature set. The Envoy sidecar container was chosen as it automatically scales network proxying capacity alongside service scaling and provides a straightforward configuration setup. Since implementing this solution, Mux no longer experiences issues with gRPC load balancing and has found additional valuable use cases for the Envoy proxy injection outside of their gRPC services.

The article discusses the use of MediaRecorder, a set of browser APIs that can capture screen and computer audio and video to produce video recordings right in your browser. It explains how to define constraints, get a stream handle for webcam and microphone or device screen, pass the stream to the MediaRecorder, operate the MediaRecorder, finish up the recording, and send it. The author also provides an open-source production example: stream.new, which implements the MediaRecorder API to allow users to record their screen or webcam and upload the results to Mux for free hosting.

Low-latency HLS (LL-HLS) is a significant advancement in delivering low-latency live video on the internet, reducing latency from 30 seconds to around 5 seconds. Mux Video has introduced a new Live Stream Latency metric in Mux Data, making it the first Quality of Experience solution to offer this metric for standard HLS protocols with support for various video players. This feature is available to all Mux Data users and helps developers measure live stream latency more accurately at scale. The Live Stream Latency metric can answer important questions about streaming operations and user experience, such as how much latency viewers are experiencing, how it affects user engagement, and where high latencies occur globally or on specific networks and devices.