Christian Pillsbury

Staff Software Engineer & Tech Lead

Started working on OTT streaming media & players over a decade ago for a bunch of folks back in the Adobe Flash/RTMP days as a consultant at Digital Primates. When I’m not working on video players, I’m spending my time doing deep dives in philosophy, stomping around the Chicago arts scene, and watching TV on the internet with my cat Grits.

A Swiss Army knife with various video player symbols (and a banana?) floating near each tool

Published on April 15, 2024 (8 months ago)

Why are video players so big? A trip down the rabbit hole of video playback engines

By Christian and Darius • 17 min read • Video education

A video playback engine enables more complex video use cases like adaptive bitrate streaming and DRM, but at the cost of bundle size. Is it worth it?

A graphic design that show a video player control bar. Hovering over the timeline are markers containing lightning bolts, depicting events occurring at specific points during the media playback.

Published on July 12, 2023 (over 1 year ago)

Build an interactive video transcript with Mux Player CuePoints

By Christian Pillsbury • 10 min read • Engineering

Learn how you can associate interactive transcript metadata with your video playback to fire custom events as your video progresses.

A stack of windows that showcase different approaches to streaming video implementations over the years

Published on October 10, 2022 (about 2 years ago)

Gone in a Flash: a brief history of HTTP Adaptive Streaming

By Christian Pillsbury • 16 min read • Video education

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is unquestionably and by orders of magnitude the dominant way of streaming media on the internet. Part history, part “hindsight is 20/20” revisionist history, and part tec...

Published on August 4, 2022 (over 2 years ago)

When it comes to players, we don't play games.

By Meg and Christian • 3 min read • Product

You knew it was coming, folks (or at least, we were not shy about it)! Mux Player is officially in Public Beta, ready to play your videos for everyone, everywhere. We’ve spent the last seven months (m...

Published on July 13, 2022 (over 2 years ago)

@mux-elements are getting a new (old) home on npm: @mux!

By Christian Pillsbury • 8 min read • Engineering

All of our Mux Elements are moving from @mux-elements to @mux on npm. In this post, we explain why and introduce some steps we took and tools we built to help with your migration.