Introduction to Video Streaming
Explore fundamental video streaming concepts such as encoding, transcoding, segmentation, and adaptive bitrate streaming. Understand how these components work together to enable efficient, scalable media delivery. This lesson lays the foundation for designing APIs in streaming platforms by explaining core protocols and the evolution of video delivery.
We'll cover the following...
Introduction
Before we further explore details on streaming services, let's first understand the different terminologies that are a part of the video streaming ecosystem. This lesson discusses the evolution, underlying concepts, specifications, frameworks, and protocols required to set a foundation for designing the API of streaming services like YouTube.
This lesson mainly consists of three sections that discuss the relevant terminologies in media streaming, the evolution of streaming, and the working mechanism of streaming. Let's start with the relevant terminologies in the following section.
Terminologies involved in media streaming
Let’s understand the different terms in the media streaming system.
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Encoding: This represents data in bits so that any redundant information is removed. An encoder will take the raw media as input at the sender’s end to compress it, whereas a decoder takes the encoded file as input at the receiver’s end to decompress it. Encoding makes it possible to send large media files over the Internet. However, the drawback is that it can result in loss of media file quality. Such encoding techniques are called lossy, although
lossless algorithms Check out the Nyquest-Shannon sampling theorem for more details. There are different audio and video encoding algorithms. For example, H.264 (also called AVC), H.265 (also HEVC), VP9, and AV1 are popular video encoding ...