I'm trying to get video/audio metadata (in particular, the title) from HTML5 <video>'s and <audio>'s. I've not been able to find anything at all about it - am I correct that this is not possible through DOM manipulation/javascript?
If that's the case, I'm thinking I will have my server download the media file and look through the metadata to determine the title (if there is one). In that case, I'm using Node.js. Is there a good library in Node that I could use? I've tried the "fluent-ffmpeg" but it did not seem to be able to get data for most of the videos I'm using - perhaps they were using codecs that it did not understand.
Any ideas? Thanks :)
For this, you will typically have to get any metadata server-side. I don't know what language you're using, but TabLib can work well with many.
Metadata for streaming media is a whole separate issue, and is entirely dependent on the server hosting the media. For Icecast/SHOUTcast streams (and compatible), see Pulling Track Info From an Audio Stream Using PHP.
I would suggest using ffprobe for this, more specifically the node-ffprobe module. But yeah, you would need to download the file and parse it through your server, AFAIK the video and audio tags can't hold metadata information yet.
Related
I'm trying to add a few videos to my website using HTML5. My videos are all 1080, but I want to give people the option to watch in a lower quality if needed. Can I do this without having to upload multiple videos (1 for each quality) without the usage of a server-side language?
I've been extensively searching for this. Haven't find anyone say that it can't be done, but no one said it can either. I am using Blogger as my host, which is why I am can't use server-side languages.
Thank you.
without the usage of a server-side language?
Yes, of course. The client can choose what version of the video to download.
Can I do this without having to upload multiple videos (1 for each quality)
Not practically, no. You need to transcode that video and upload those different versions.
Haven't find anyone say that it can't be done
A couple things to consider... first is that a video file can contain many streams. I don't know what your aversion is to multiple files, but yes it is possible to have several bitrates of video in a single container. A single MP4, for example, could easily contain a 768 kbps video, a 2 Mbps video, and an 8 Mbps video, while having a single 256 kbps audio track.
To play such a file, a client (implemented with Media Source Extensions and the Fetch API) would need to know how to parse the container and make ranged requests for specific chunks out of the file. To my knowledge, no such client exists as there's little point to it when you can simply use DASH and/or HLS. The browser certainly doesn't do this work for you.
Some video codecs, like H.264, support the concept of scaling. The idea here is that rather than having multiple encodings, there's just one where additional data enhances the previous video that was sent. There is significant overhead with this mechanism, and even more work you'd have to do. Not only does your code now need to understand the container, but now it has to handle the codec in use as well... and it needs to do it efficiently.
To summarize, is it possible to use one file? Technically, yes. Is there any benefit? None. Is there anything off-the-shelf for this? No.
Edit: I see now your comment that the issue is one of storage space. You should really put that information in your question so you can get a useful answer.
It's common for YouTube and others to transcode things ahead of time. This is particularly useful for videos that get a ton of traffic, as the segments can be stored on the CDN, with nodes closer to the clients. Yes, it's also possible to transcode on-demand as well. You need fast hardware for this.
No.
I can't fathom how this could ever be possible. Do you have an angle in mind?
Clients can either download all or part(s) of a file. But to do this you would have to somehow download only select pixels of each frame. Even if you had knowledge of which byte-ranges of each frame were which pixels, the overhead involved in requesting each byte-range would be greater than the size of the full 1080p video.
What is your aversion to hosting multiple qualities? Is it about storage space, or complexity/time of conversion?
Apparently I used the totally wrong keywords while googling because Im looking for solutions on how to embed videos in my webpage and still make "impossible" (i.e. make it hard) to download these directly as a mp4 file. I mean there are various players where you'll quite easily find out the original file on the webserver directly within the browser...
And on the opposite there are pages like youtube where you cannot really find out the full file but you'd have to use third party solutions to download the files.
Do you know any libraries / modules which support embedding in such a way like youtube?
Thanks
It really is not that hard to download/capture the file if you are making it available to stream to a device, even for YouTube videos, so you have to consider what your goals are.
Most content protection systems, or Digital Rights Management systems, don't really attempt to stop someone capturing the file. Rather they try to ensure that the captured file is of no use by having it encrypted so it cannot play back.
The tricky part then moves to securely sharing the decryption key with authorised users in a way that neither they nor a third party can view or share the key. This is the essence of nearly all common DRM systems.
If you do want to use DRM but don't want to pay for a full DRM solution then you could use clear key encryption with MPEG-DASH streaming. This essentially transmits the key with the stream so it not very secure, but it may meet your needs. There is some info on using it with a cloud encoding service here:
https://bitmovin.com/tutorials/mpeg-cenc-clearkey-drm-encryption/
Is it possible to work mpeg-dash with only file and not two files, one for audio and one for video?
If so, please explain how to decode (tool, arguments).
Thanks in advance!
MPEG-DASH does not limit you to have separate audio/video tracks (two, or even more files). However, in many scenarios this is the preferable solution - think of multi-language use cases.
Regarding decoding/playback - that's highly depending on the used player and/or decoding engine. Most modern browser's Media Source Extensions are for instance capable of handling such multiplexed content.
Is there any media player solution that will play audio and video files in Firefox,Chrome, Safari and IE.
I've tried MediaElementJS but it fails on .mov. This project has clients uploading a movie file and there can only be one version of each file. I can programatically change the code for each type of file and the user's OS/browser but I still couldnt get .mov's to download progressively.
What am I missing here? I'm not very familiar with media file types. Just wondering if anyone had any suggestions.
Take a look at the JW Player. It's highly configurable. Best combination is with a real streaming server provider. If you want to let your clients switch to different positions in your media files it might best work that you "normalize" all your different media types to one format (converting them after the upload) - be it .flv/flash - and focus on one player like the above. The files could be streamed with modules from webservers like nginx or lighttpd - but a real provider like Bits on the Run will convert most of the files for you very easily and handle the streaming more reliably.
I'm looking to build a jukebox and I am wondering how one would secure songs that are in <audio> tags with HTML 5. I don't want people to be able to download the song, but I'd like to stream it via those <audio> tags. Any suggestions?
you could check referer, use some hashing mechanism (unique ID) to verify the streaming player is your jukebox, not the stream saver etc.
BUT: whatever you do, some people will figure it out (or using the last resort - catching the whole stream, following on what kind of data your jukebox sends etc.)
Whatever you give people to listen via a stream can be saved to disk too.
It's possible using Amazon S3 (similar to the way Soundcloud does it) to generate secure mp3 links for use in your HTML5 player. You generate a secure mp3 on S3 that is valid for a very short time (seconds or minutes), there by prevent someone from copying and sharing the link. You will need to generate the link dynamically using SDK/API.
See example of how to use PHP to generate secure links.
This is not possible. In order for the client computer to be able to play the song, the song has to be transferred there. Period.