Panda

Panda is an open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming.

Please see pandastream.com for an introduction and lots of documentation.

Information beyond this point is aimed at people who want to contribute to panda and / or understand how it works.

How does Panda work?

1. Video is uploaded to panda
2. Panda checks the video's metadata, uploads the raw file to S3 and adds it to the encoding queue
3. The encoder application picks the encoding job off the queue when it's free and encodes the video to all possible formats
4. Panda sends a callback to your web application notifying you the video has been encoded
5. You use the appropriate S3 url of the encoding to embed the video

Installation and setup

Please note that this guide has only been tested on OSX. Please post modifications to the google group if you try another platform.

Install dependencies

First install the following gems

sudo gem install merb merb_helpers activesupport RubyInline amazon_sdb aws-s3 uuid flvtool2

Next you'll need to install libgd, ffmpeg, and the rvideo gem:

LibGD

On OSX (using macports)

Installing gd2 with macports seems to be the fastest way to install the required dependencies:

sudo port install gd2

For some reason (which I've not really looked into) the macports install doesn't quite install everything so you still need to install libgd itself (but not the dependencies) from source:

mkdir -p ~/src && cd ~/src
curl http://www.libgd.org/releases/gd-2.0.35.tar.gz > gd-2.0.35.tar.gz
tar zxvf gd-2.0.35.tar.gz
cd gd-2.0.35 && ./configure && make && sudo make install

Alternatively, if you want to build everything from source, see this tutorial. Here's a possible gotcha.

Other platforms

The following libraries are required by libgd:

• zlib
• libjpeg
• libgd

Install libjpeg from source:

mkdir -p ~/src && cd ~/src
wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar zxvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b && ./configure && make && sudo make install

Install libgd from source:

  mkdir -p ~/src && cd ~/src
  curl http://www.libgd.org/releases/gd-2.0.35.tar.gz > gd-2.0.35.tar.gz
  tar zxvf gd-2.0.35.tar.gz
  cd gd-2.0.35 && ./configure && make && sudo make install

RVideo (0.9.4)

Currently we can't use sudo gem install rvideo since that installs 0.9.3.

svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rvideo/trunk rvideo
cd rvideo
rake install_gem

Install the rvideo tools (on OS X at least - your system may differ). You might want to check your gem library location (gem env).

sudo cp lib/rvideo/tools/*.rb /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rvideo-0.9.4/lib/rvideo/tools/.

FFMPEG

Available in all good package repositories including Darwin Ports.

If you're developing on Mac OS X, you can save some time by grabbing ffmpeg out of the ffmpegX application instead of compiling it.

Grab Panda

Get the latest (at this moment, our code is compatible with 0.9.7)

git clone git://github.com/newbamboo/panda.git

Development work is merged regularly into the master branch. If you have difficulty running try the stable branch which tracks releases.

You should follow the getting started guide from the configure panda section onwards. You'll probably want to use the filesystem storage option and also emulate SimpleDB locally.

Further information

Investigating encoding errors

When an encoding fails the status of the video is set to 'error' and the output of ffmpeg is saved on S3 with the filename video_token.error.

SimpleDB

Please refer to amazon_sdb for how to access simpledb. Here are some examples.

Extracting All info

>> Profile.query

Extracting specific info

>> Profile.query("['audio_coded' = 'aac']")

Deleting a profile.

>> profile = Profile.query("['title'='Flash h264 SD']")
>> profile.destroy!

Videos schema

filename # 976a4b00-16cc-012b-7316-001ec2b5c0e1.flv
original_filename # sneezing_panda.flv
parent

status # original, queued, processing, done, error

duration
container
width
height

video_codec
video_bitrate
fps
audio_codec
audio_sample_rate

profile # id of encoding profile used
profile_title

updated_at
created_at

Encoding profiles schema

title

container
width
height

video_codec
video_bitrate
fps
audio_codec
audio_bitrate
audio_sample_rate

updated_at
created_at