R7

In prepa­ra­tion for the cov­er­age of the 2012 Lon­don Olympics at r7.com, we im­ple­mented sev­eral im­prove­ments to FFm­peg to meet the de­sired pub­lish­ing time SLA, which needed to be low­ered from about 1 hour to less than 10 min­utes. These im­prove­ments in­cluded adding sup­port for a Black­magic cap­ture card, ad­just­ing seg­mented file record­ing for seam­less con­cate­na­tion on Final Cut 7, and im­ple­ment­ing QT ref­er­ence files with edit lists on FFmbc to en­able faster ren­der­ing by the ed­i­tors.

Ad­di­tion­ally, we de­vel­oped a high-​performance captcha for r7.com that uti­lized FreeType, a pre-​calculated per­lin noise dis­placer, Tur­bo­JPEG, and OpenSSL. This captcha gen­er­ated a state­less JSON chal­lenge that could be ren­dered by the client and sent with the an­swer to the back­end for val­i­da­tion. It was ca­pa­ble of gen­er­at­ing over 3000 captchas per sec­ond per thread in local bench­marks and re­mained on­line for more than a decade.

Fi­nally, we mod­ern­ized and stan­dard­ized the web­site's video player for em­bed­ding through­out the por­tal, with a tran­si­tional ar­chi­tec­ture that used Flash ini­tially and HTML5 HLS in a later stage.

Credit

• platform: Java, Ruby, Perl, C, FFmpeg, Wowza, Blackmagic
• Carlo 'zED' Caputo: developer, systems architect

Links

• Video Site
• Captcha Service