This project for BAFTA involved building a system that professional media organisations could use to upload, transcode and distribute videos and other media content in the cloud.
Cloud computing
The services are closely linked to Amazon’s suite of cloud computing products, including S3, Cloudfront, SQS, Glacier and EC2.
The services are scalable, secure and reliable with great API interfaces allowing us to access them via PHP and Javascript.
Javascript Backbone
The front end of the site is build in Backbone which allows us to create a completely static codebase which can be distributed via S3. The Javascript interacts with the data via a custom API build in Symfony.
Video transcoding
Since this service is aimed at media professionals we need to offer them as much control as possible over the transcoding settings. A neat but powerful UX was developed that allows all the major encoding properties to be customised. Users can also create “hot folders” which will encode any videos uploaded in to them to a defined set of formats.
Video distribution
Videos can be played in the file manager using an HTML5 video player, and they can also be distributed and embedded in third party websites via some embed code which will provide various encoded versions of the file for different bandwidth requirements.
