Norigin Diaries
Our Streaming TV Journal about
Tech, Product & Content in between!
Thursday, 9th November
Having a single video player across all streaming devices is every video app developer’s dream.
Unfortunately, there are a few challenges, to say the least. This is despite having a wide adoption of support for HTML5 video tags, EME, and MSE across video streaming devices.
Open-source video players like Shaka Player, video.js, hls.js, and dash.js function reasonably well across a range of different devices, streaming formats, and video playback features. But for advanced OTT services with playback features, complexities from different streaming formats, DRMs, server-side (SSAI), and/or client-side ads (CSAI) make it challenging to get one player to work for all devices and features.
It will require seasoned video software engineers to adapt such open-source players into premium streaming apps. Developers will either need to dive into the open-source code or decide to use different players for different devices.
The alternative is to use commercially available players but as the devils are in the details it can easily slow you down while waiting for an external support organisation to solve your problems, roadmaps, costs, and IPR ownership to all align perfectly well.
A good option to consider is to have a flexible video player framework that allows you to easily switch between different players and enable/disable player features – based on the device and in runtime.
That is as close to the fulfillment of the dream as you will get today.
Wednesday, 1st November
Why do Developers code everything from scratch?
Developers do not necessarily code everything from scratch, but having ownership of the technical design and architecture is important when writing software. There is a vast amount of code available online in the form of open source software that engineers use to learn from or re-use others´ work, while building new things.
Building anything from scratch, ensures control or ownership – Readymade libraries and tools that can be free or licensed surely inspire all software engineers.
When the task is simple enough to build and doesn’t have external dependencies, it’s an obvious decision to code from scratch. But when an engineer decides to use external third party libraries, they would assume such code is self-sustaining and comes with regular updates for bug fixes and enhancements.. It would be a nightmare for an engineer to refactor apps or products that are based on deprecated technology.
Developers who have the luxury of time, have a need for control, have complex goals or where there are no generic libraries available, choose to build from scratch.
There is a time and place to buy or build things – in whole or in part. It would not be the same coding goals or situations to code from scratch or use existing libraries or tools available on the vast internet.