Streaming involves data transmission while watching a video on the internet. It enables the delivery of files bit by bit from local storage. It is advantageous since, through it, a few seconds of the video can be easily transmitted thus enabling playing the video without having to fully download it.
Live streaming involves sending the video over the internet; without having to necessarily store it first. With the modern innovations, TV, video games and social media videos can all be live-streamed via various secure video streaming platforms out there. You can even use YouTube to live stream nowadays, as well as other big names out there, including Twitch and Vimeo. Some users are able to boost their live streaming metrics by using websites such as Jaynike. Below are the technical procedures and steps involved in the working of live streaming.
Video Capture
Both streaming and live streaming begins when raw data is captured. Cameras with high resolution are normally used to produce quality videos. The raw data obtained is converted to computer-readable language; in the forms of 0s and 1s.
Compression and encoding
This is the next step after capturing the raw data. It involves compressing and cutting redundant visual information. For instance, for a video having a gray background in its first frame, the gray background mustn’t reappear in the subsequent frames.
Have you walked into an apartment with several rooms before tenants move in? How did the rooms look before they were furnished? Now video compression is like furnishing an apartment so that each area has its own connotation. Just as in furnishing, it’s not necessary to buy new furniture every time a person moves into a new apartment.
You can gradually change the outlook of the room by buying the furniture one at a time. The same can be said about video compression, not all parts of the frame need to be changed totality. Encoding involves changing data into a new format. For the devices to recognize live streaming data, it is usually converted into digitally interpretable formats. Examples of forms of video encoding standards are H.264, H.265, VP9, and AV1.
Segmentation
A video has a lot of digital information which explains why its way much easier to download files in pdf format than to download the videos. Usually, it’s impractical to upload all the video data over the internet at once thus it’s imperative to segment the video. This involves dividing the video into smaller sections of a few seconds in length which can easily be sent online. This allows for easier transmission of video. The segmented videos take a shorter time as compared to the whole video.
CDN Distribution and Caching
Wondering how a video is made available to thousands of viewers at the same time? Once compressed and encoded, it’s necessary to make the video accessible to dozens of viewers who are in dire need of it. To serve several viewers while maintaining the quality of the video, CDN is used to distribute the video. The CDN is made up of several distributed networks of servers that distribute the videos on behalf of the original server while caching it.
Using the CDN, requests made by the users do not travel to the original server since they can be handled by any nearby server thus resulting in faster and more efficient performance. With this, the workload on the original server-id reduced exponentially thus enabling it to produce more quality data. Moreover, CDN servers are allocated all over the world thus it serves all users over the world thereby reducing clustering in a certain area.
With the CDN, the data is also cached. This allows for temporary saving of each segment of the livestream thus a good number of viewers get the live stream from the cache and not from the original server. This reduces the time difference between livestream and real-time though the cached data normally lags behind by a few seconds as the trip to and from the original server is cut.
Decoding and video playback
The Livestream is sent to all users watching the stream. After receiving the video, it is decoded and decompressed by every device. Through the media player of the device of the user or a video player located in the browser, the data received is interpreted as visual information which is then played.
Live Streaming has impacted a lot in the online sharing of visual information. As it renews itself, several other techniques such as the Cloud flare should be combined with it to enhance the speed of Livestream delivery.
