Sometimes you need more than a definition for a word but less than a technical textbook. We realized that it's hard to find the right level of information when you’re new to online video technology.
When you Google or look on Quora, Stack Overflow, and other company’s websites, you might get a very specific answer to a question but without the general context of how video works overall. Without that context, it’s hard to understand the full impact of the decision you’re trying to make. We, ourselves, couldn’t find a good consolidated resource to help answer the common questions we hear from fellow developers and customers. So...we decided to make one!
We’re excited to introduce HowVideo.works. The goal of this site is to:
- Explain key concepts, processes, and infrastructure of modern online video.
- Show how all those pieces work together.
- Expose all the decision points required if you’re planning on building video into your application.
We want to provide a balance of educational and technical information so that it’s a jumping off point for you to dig into other topics in detail and have enough knowledge to ask the right questions as you plan your video tech stack.
You’ll see that we start backwards by talking about the finished product first in Playback. This is because the concepts in Playback are actually where a lot of developers start the process in their video journey. This section covers:
- HLS
- Manifest Files
- DASH
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
- MP4 & WebM
- Players
If, after learning about Playback, you want to get hands on with HLS, check out this walk through. It's written by one of our developers who, admittedly, was not a video expert when he joined.
For the Delivery, Processing, and Capture sections, we plan to co-write them with companies who are experts in those parts of the video tech stack. This is a work in progress and we’d love to hear feedback and ideas on what you’d find helpful. Check back often for new content!
