You might not believe it, but working at a company like Brightcove means you think about video quite a bit. For a service like Zencoder, for instance, we constantly need to keep in mind what formats our customers need now and down the road, along with the devices they will want to support. The world of video is big and a lot of the work we do affects others in our space (and vice versa), making it important for those of us working in this space to communicate. Because of this, we're supporting the SF Video Technology Meetup, and we'd love for you to join us.
Last Tuesday was the 5th meeting, and Robert Scott, the platform engineering manager at Inkling, spoke to us about Inkling's platform and how they handle video. He walked us through the Inkling service itself from both an editor's and a user's perspective, then went into the process they went through before deciding on a transcoding service. The group is usually pretty vocal, so Inkling's use of signed Cloud Front URLs with HTTP Live Streaming led to a great discussion on the practice.
Excellent presentations from last year included J Sherwani and Faraz Khan from Screenhero, who talked about H.264 vs VP8 for low-latency video streaming, and Jon Gubman from Funny or Die, who followed up with a presentation on Funny or Die's switch to HTML5 video from Flash and the gotchas they uncovered along the way. Robert Scott started the new year on an excellent note, so we'd like to continue the trend in the upcoming months, but the group needs your help.
This month's meetup (February 25th) is going to focus on HTTP streaming. The talks will be a bit more of a lightning talk format, with Anton Kast (Video Architect at Yahoo) giving an overview of Dash, and myself (Matt McClure) talking about dynamically generating HLS manifests. One more talk maybe added before the meetup, so keep an eye out.
Interested in talking? Please get in touch! Anyone is welcome to the floor, it doesn't have to be long (anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes), and can consist of anything from technical demos to presentations (or both). The general rule of thumb is that it should be interesting to engineers that work with video, but other than that we're open to any proposals.
If you're interested in coming, please join the Meetup so we can get in touch about updates (and make sure to buy enough food and drink). Hope to see you there!