-1

I have a theoretical question on how cloud services or VOD services are streaming their video files.

For example you can upload almost any video format in Google Drive and DropBox and then through their web app you can play it. How you can do that if the html5 video tag supports just mp4, ogg and webM and there is no plugin installed or flash enabled on my browser?And what about youtube? How does streaming works? You can upload almost any type of video format. Do they transcode it on upload or it stays with the original file format?

For learning purpuses I'm creating a web app using a cloud service API but I'm not able to play all video types from my cloud because of the browser video tag limitation. Can you help me with any information on how they do it and what can I do in my web app to be able to play more video formats.

Julian Docev
  • 119
  • 9

1 Answers1

1

They convert the video, server side, into a format that can be played by browsers. Its expensive, and very complicated. Large companies like Dropbox hire dozens of employees to build that system. Small companies outsource it to places like mux or competitors. (Full disclosure, I make video encoding software for mux)

szatmary
  • 29,969
  • 8
  • 44
  • 57
  • Thank you @szatmary very much for your answer. Yes i though it might be something like that but i wasn't sure as it seems a lot CPU consuming process. I suppose you need a lot of very powerfull servers to do this transcoding, right? I took a look at mux.com but i couldn't understand how it wotks. When you outsourse it does a company as mux have to host the video or I for example can host it in .avi format for example and the outsource company just transcode it on a demande and give me a link with the transcoded file? – Julian Docev Nov 16 '19 at 15:42
  • Essentially, you post a link to, or upload the file, then mux returns a playable url. There is a demo on the the front page you can paste your own url into that demonstrates how it works. You can also look at the docs. – szatmary Nov 16 '19 at 18:03