SoundStream
At a Glance
- Tasks Performed: Web Design, Ruby on Rails Development,
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Date Launched: December 22, 2016
About the Project
SoundStream is a live streaming platform for musicians. It mimics twitch in both design and functionality but is built specifically for musicians. It took over a year to build, using ruby on rails and is my largest project to date.
Users can signup and create a profile to live stream with just their camera and mic on their computer. No additional software is needed. Users can start a stream and chat in real time with other people who are also watching the stream. They can accept donations, message other users, browse by instrument or genre, and much more.
This was built using a platform called OpenTok which integrates with rails and Amazon s3 buckets. It works like this: a user starts a session, and is live. When they end the session, the video gets saved into an Amazon S3 bucket. From there, the video is then transcoded (using Amazon’s elastic transcoder) into a variety of formats. This transcoding allows us to capture info from the video (the length) and display it in a way that all browsers can render (in mp4 format).
Furthermore, we used Amazon’s CDN to display all this stuff lightning fast. Since everything is integrated the setup was fairly simple.
The one fallback of using OpenTok is that you can only stream on Chrome & Firefox, because it relies on new WebRTC technology that only the Chrome browser has. That being said, this was by far the most cost effective solution for live streaming and chatting.
SoundStream is a live streaming platform for musicians. It mimics twitch in both design and functionality but is built specifically for musicians. It took over a year to build, using ruby on rails and is my largest project to date.
Users can signup and create a profile to live stream with just their camera and mic on their computer. No additional software is needed. Users can start a stream and chat in real time with other people who are also watching the stream. They can accept donations, message other users, browse by instrument or genre, and much more.
This was built using a platform called OpenTok which integrates with rails and Amazon s3 buckets. It works like this: a user starts a session, and is live. When they end the session, the video gets saved into an Amazon S3 bucket. From there, the video is then transcoded (using Amazon’s elastic transcoder) into a variety of formats. This transcoding allows us to capture info from the video (the length) and display it in a way that all browsers can render (in mp4 format).
Furthermore, we used Amazon’s CDN to display all this stuff lightning fast. Since everything is integrated the setup was fairly simple.
The one fallback of using OpenTok is that you can only stream on Chrome & Firefox, because it relies on new WebRTC technology that only the Chrome browser has. That being said, this was by far the most cost effective solution for live streaming and chatting.