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Video Streaming: A Complete Guide to Video Delivery: From ABR and CDNs to Players, WebRTC, DRM, and the Economics of Streaming
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 594
Weight: 2.24
Height: 1.20 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
The stream has reached the network. Everything that decides whether the viewer stays happens next: which rung of the ladder the player picks, whether the CDN serves from cache, how the player recovers from a stall, whether DRM lets the frame decode, and what the whole thing costs per hour delivered. This volume is that second half, and it is where streaming stops being a protocol question and becomes an engineering and economic one.
It opens with ABR - what adaptivity really is, how a bitrate ladder is built, and how buffer-based, throughput-based and hybrid algorithms actually decide. Then packaging, trick play and captions; then CDNs at length: cache hierarchy, multi-CDN steering, origin protection, and the economics of delivery. Then the player - anatomy, MSE and EME, web players, and the platform players on mobile and TV. Then WebRTC and real time: signaling, security, SFU topologies, simulcast and SVC, and what breaks at scale. It closes on operations - DRM and CENC, ad insertion, QoE and observability, watermarking and geo-restriction, and the full cost model of a streaming service.
Every topic reads on its top layer without mathematics and is still accurate; the rigorous layer sits underneath, in boxes you can skip. Each chapter ends with review questions, problems, and a lab you run on FFmpeg, a packager, a browser player and an SFU.
What is inside- ABR and packaging - adaptivity, the bitrate ladder, ABR algorithms, packaging, trick play and captions
- CDN and scale - CDN for streaming, cache hierarchy, multi-CDN steering, origin protection, CDN economics
- The player - player anatomy, MSE and EME, web players, mobile and TV platform players
- WebRTC and real time - the big picture, connection and security, SFU topologies, simulcast and SVC, WebRTC at scale
- Operations - DRM and CENC, DRM systems, ad insertion, QoE and observability, watermarking and geo, streaming economics
Backend, media and player engineers, and technical leads who own delivery cost and quality of experience. A short bridge chapter recaps Volume 1, so this volume can be read on its own - though the two together are the full path.
26 chapters, 7 appendices, 162 figures, a 383-entry bibliography, a 689-entry glossary and index, and 26 labs. Book 3 of 7, Volume 2, in The Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook.
Nikolay Sapunov is CEO and co-founder of Fora Soft, which has built video, real-time and AI systems since 2005: 250+ delivered projects, a 50-engineer team, systems used by NBC, Coca-Cola and Red Bull. This series is the training the company uses on its own engineers.
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