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How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

toptal.com

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Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#81

Post by toptalgergely »

jeremyx wrote: post #56
crm416 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here, and Director of Community at Toptal. This is the first live article, but we've got loads more in progress covering a bunch of different projects and technologies.

Ballsy to lead with an article about porn. I'm glad you did because I know they must face scaling challenges that only a handful of services have to deal with, but rarely do I see articles about how they overcome the challenges. Thanks.

I'm glad you liked it, it was a lot of fun. I also implemented on the fly transcoding, but that's probably for a different article.

For the tech, well really at that place we used pretty much what everyone else did. Not a lot of big secrets, as far as I know the porn driving the tech revolution thing is ridiculous.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#82

Post by coldtea »

danso wrote: post #68
coldtea wrote: post #64

I'm astonished by some of the responses here, that could be summarised thusly: > "I work on workplace, in a modern western society, not some theocratic backwater, that monitors my web activity and would frown if I visited an article with the word porn in it. This on 2013. I find this OK, and won't quit my job or raise hell protesting this degrading treatment, but would rather complain for HN titles" . In an age where…

Since when did workplaces become bastions of principles, rather than bureaucracies that have a business to run and have to, at some level, apply policies that suspend an employee's worktime freedom as part of the agreement that involves paying that employee's salary? I work at a small company where no one would care. They also don't care if I spend time on Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. But not everyone is in a company…

>Since when did workplaces become bastions of principles, rather than bureaucracies that have a business to run and have to, at some level, apply policies that suspend an employee's worktime freedom as part of the agreement that involves paying that employee's salary?

Since people let them get away with it. The "agreement that involves paying that employee's salary" does not meant they should get away with treating him less than a civilized society accept.

Signing a contract to work on some place doesn't give the employer any inherent rights over the employee, besides those that the society is willing to accept.

Hitting an employee was once tolerated. Not so anymore. One time not hiring or paying blacks less was allowed. Not so anymore (not explicitly at least). Child labour was allowed. Not anymore. Racial or sexist slurs were allowed. Not anymore. Lax safety at work was tolerated. Not anymore.

So it's not like there is some undeniable inherent right of an employeer to "have the employee pee in a cup" or to "check his Facebook profile". It's just that people haven't protested enough to make it into law that it's not his fucking business what the employee does at his own time.

>It's best to let the worker -- the HN reader in this case -- make the decision whether he/she wants to pick that fight, rather than have them accidentally stumble into it.

Sure, but at least some anger should be directed against businesses having those policies, not just on HN titles, as if the policies are OK.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#83

Post by coldtea »

untog wrote: post #70
coldtea wrote: post #64

I'm astonished by some of the responses here, that could be summarised thusly: > "I work on workplace, in a modern western society, not some theocratic backwater, that monitors my web activity and would frown if I visited an article with the word porn in it. This on 2013. I find this OK, and won't quit my job or raise hell protesting this degrading treatment, but would rather complain for HN titles" . In an age where…

Where exactly is the link between porn and LGBT rights?

The link is that sex (even gay/lesbian etc sex) is not a sin, what people like sexually is not the business of their employeer, and if we can accept people doing parades for the right to fuck each other in the ass or similar, we sure should be able to accept people reading the word "porn" on a website at work.

That's the implicit link. The explicit link is that LGBT advocates and activists have frequently defended porn and freedom of sexual expression through it, too.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#84

Post by ianhawes »

If anyone is interested in an alternative to the usual RTMP servers (FMS, Red5, and Wowza), I highly recommend EvoStream (http://www.evostream.com). Compared to the alternatives, EvoStream is much more efficient. I believe TinyChat published a whitepaper discussing their transition from Red5 to EvoStream, which resulted in a decline in the number of required servers.

EvoStream is a highly scalable streaming media server written in C++ based off of the open source RTMPD (http://www.rtmpd.com). The commercial company, also called EvoStream, is a relatively new startup and they do great custom work for those not familiar with streaming media/RTMP.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#85

Post by enraged_camel »

philh wrote: post #72
peterhajas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do mods change titles of posts? This is frequently complained about on HN, and seems unfortunate.

Mostly they make things better, and nobody notices. Sometimes they make things worse, and people complain.

>>Mostly

I don't mean to be a hardass, but... citation needed.

Seriously, we have no data on the number of mod edits made vs. complaints voiced. As such it seems premature to conclude that mods mostly do a good job with these arbitrary edits.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#86

Post by [deleted] »

ianhawes wrote: post #84

If anyone is interested in an alternative to the usual RTMP servers (FMS, Red5, and Wowza), I highly recommend EvoStream ( http://www.evostream.com ). Compared to the alternatives, EvoStream is much more efficient. I believe TinyChat published a whitepaper discussing their transition from Red5 to EvoStream, which resulted in a decline in the number of required servers. EvoStream is a highly scalable streaming media s…

[deleted]

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#88

Post by christopheraden »

kbenson wrote: post #3

I love reading articles about technical issues and solutions in the Porn industry. It's like getting a peek inside a youtube scale company as they grow.

Disregarding the morality and ethics that are often center-stage, they are faced with really interesting technical hurdles. It's an old article, but I was fascinated to hear about some of the challenges they face as well: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/2/youporn-targeting-2...

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#89

Post by MBCook »

toptalgergely wrote: post #48
jallmann wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I extract the FLV tags, which I could use to multicast I assume you don't really mean IP multicast (which would, incidentally, be one approach to edge-origin mirroring for the popular marketing campaigns you mentioned, at least within a data center). Anyway that makes sense, simply sending the FLV is clever. What's the method of delivery -- chunked HTTP? Does it play well with proxies?

No, not IP multicast. Imagine it as a web server that serves FLV files which always start at the current stream position. This is what it did. Actually bringing up the proxy issue is interesting. I'm not sure if it does. Essentially forbidding all caching would make it play nice.

Isn't that pretty close to how HTTP Live Streaming works?
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