859: Streaming Video in 2025
Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats
Wes Bos
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Scott and Wes break down the tech behind video streaming for the web, from transcoding and variants to CDN and access control. They also share insights on tools like Mux, Cloudflare Stream, and ffmpeg, plus tips for managing bandwidth, hosting, and costs.
Show Notes
- 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
- 00:50 Brought to you by Sentry.io.
- 01:15 The history of video streaming.
- 02:10 How video streaming works: The Tech.
- 03:54 How video streaming works: Transcoding.
- 06:37 How video streaming works: Variants.
- 13:13 Dynamic ad insertion.
- 14:29 Bandwidth and hosting.
- Mux.
- 18:03 Cloudflare.
- 19:13 The costs.
- 25:39 Media players.
- 29:42 CDN.
- 32:04 Access control.
- 33:35 Solutions.
- 41:55 Some other features.
- 45:47 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs.
Sick Picks
- Scott: Anker MagGo.
- Wes: PolyCapture.
Shameless Plugs
- Scott: Syntax on YouTube.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.8 | Welcome to Syntax. Today, I got an episode for you on streaming video in 2025, both rolling your own streaming video, how that works, as well as talking about a bunch of services that will help you out with it. |
| 0:15.2 | My name is Wes Boss. I'm a developer from Canada, streams a lot of video with, as always, is also someone who streams |
| 0:22.5 | a lot of videos. Scott Tolensky, how are you doing today, Scott? Hey, man, doing great. You know what? |
| 0:28.2 | It is definitely a deep well that I have traveled many times before, but the landscape definitely |
| 0:34.8 | has changed, so I'm really stoked to talk about this in general, |
| 0:38.9 | just beyond the tech and practically what can you do in 2024 and beyond 20, let's just say |
| 0:45.1 | 2025. Let's face it, we're there already, which that's crazy, right? So if you are going to be |
| 0:51.6 | rolling your own, you're going to need sentry because you're going to be hitting your fair share of bugs. |
| 0:55.7 | I know we run FFMPEG in a WASM worker in serverless functions. |
| 1:02.3 | And we've hit our fair share of oddities that have popped up there. |
| 1:06.5 | And Century has been pivotal in figuring out why those things don't work. |
| 1:11.2 | Check it out. |
| 1:17.4 | Century.io forward slash syntax. Yes, absolutely pivotal. So let's get into it. First and foremost, streaming video. You know, in the past, in olden days of web, you couldn't use |
| 1:24.8 | anything other than Flash to play video. Then we got the video element for |
| 1:29.4 | HTML. And the way people were primarily doing it at the time on a non-like large scale, |
| 1:36.3 | like if you were just having video on your site, what you would do is you would encode a few |
| 1:41.5 | different versions of your video. One was like, man, I even forgot OGV, OGG format. |
| 1:47.2 | Oh, that was awful, yeah, OGV and whatever. |
| 1:50.1 | For Firefox. |
| 1:50.7 | So all the different browsers had their own different formats. |
| 1:53.2 | You had to ship all those different formats to everyone. |
| 1:56.5 | Then, you know, YouTube revolution, all that stuff. |
... |
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