It’s time we break the silence !
Since the last post, your host has arrived on the team. I am excited to bring my experience in Video, Linux, and Web development that I gained during the last years at STVS, another amazing company. But for now, let me tell you of the latest updates on the PandaStream platform.
Web interface speedup
After our ruby 1.9 migration, the average page response got divided by two, down to around 350ms. Missing, is the /cloud page that still takes around 1 second to load so that is something we are going to work on next.
Web+Heroku ♥
For the Heroku customers ; you can now access to a specialized version of our interface by logging into Heroku and choosing the Panda Stream Add-on. This can be handy if you want to follow visually the progress of your encoding and get real-time notifications. You can also access it by typing the following command in your console. Enjoy !
$ heroku addons:open pandastream --app your_app_name
Watermarking support for the API
Watermark support has been added last week and it works on all video format. I proposed that we follow the CSS absolute element convention for the image positioning and it works like that :
p = Panda::Profile.find(your_id)
p.watermark_url = "http://www.pandastream.com/images/panda_logo.png”
p.watermark_bottom = 5 # in pixels
p.watermark_right = 5 # in pixels
p.save
http://www.pandastream.com/docs/encoding_profiles#watermarking
In the process, we also added some more fields for the custom presets that might be useful for you :
$max_audio_bitrate$ : keeps the original bitrate until it goes over audio_bitrate
$max_video_bitrate$ : keeps the original bitrate until it goes over video_bitrate
$fps$ : value of the original framerate
$filters$: scale your video considering the `aspect_mode` attribute of your profile and apply watermarking options (only avaiable for ffmpeg06)
http://www.pandastream.com/docs/encoding_profiles#variables
WebM speed-up
After we updated our FFmpeg build, we saw almost a double speedup for the WebM encodings. This brings WebM up to speed with the h.264 transcoding. Next, we will publish some encoding speed results for your eyes so that you can compare our platform to our competitors.
Uploader CDN
v1.3 of the uploaded is now avaible on our CDN for your very convenience. You can link directly to the below url and we take care of the rest. In any case there is a JavaScript bug, we deploy the new version and you have nothing to do. the /1.3 path also guarantees that we won’t push backward-incompatible changes to this version.
How to use ? Just add the following script to your page and you are ready to go !
<script
src="https://cdn.pandastream.com/u/1.3/jquery.panda-uploader.min.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
For more details, check-out the documentation
A big props goes to the awesome JBundle which we use to package and distribute the uploader to the CDN.
Check it out : https://github.com/ismasan/jbundle
To keep you informed on the new platform updates, follow this blog or our twitter account