Recasting and recording system enhancement

The Request

Fluendo’s Consulting Services team was approached to add new features to a Recasting and Recording System (RRS) that was developed for the client in a previous phase. Adding these new features to the RRS may enable it to replace the current solution installed in multiple client projects.

The client is a global leader in audio and video solutions, specializing in processing, analyzing, managing, and storing audio and video across various formats, including file-based, streaming, and live (TV). Their innovative systems integrate advanced third-party AI analytics and algorithms, serving industries like security, government, public administration, healthcare, and legal.

Features

The new features to be added included:

• Supporting a new set of source and recasting formats.
• Supporting new recording formats.
• Add a specific transcoding support to the recording feature.
• Adding new asynchronous notifications to enable the integration with the current system.

Project constraints

These features needed to be added in a short time frame for the client to be able to consider the RRS as an alternative to their current solution.

Development

The RRS was designed with a modular and decoupled architecture, able to support an initial set of protocols and formats so that adding support for additional elements would not impact the core functionality. Since the RRS was designed to be easily maintained and extended, there was a negligible development overhead when adding these new features. Plugging new items into the RRS was seamless, following the patterns established in the previous development.

The result on the user side is that the API remains consistent with the addition of the new types of elements and their specific properties.

Testing

These new features were tested by extending the Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tests that were included in the previous cycle:

• Feature Files: Define test scenarios.
• Behave Framework: Executes scenarios and steps in Python.
• HTTP Client (Python): Sends HTTP requests to the server.
• Third-party Components: Manage WebRTC signalling servers and VLC servers for video streaming and handle HTTP requests. It also facilitates video download testing and WebRTC message verification.

The testing focuses on three areas:

• Channels: Verifies channel configurations via HTTP.
• Protocols: Test communication protocols like WebRTC signalling, UDP, RTSP, and video storage features.
• Performance: Measures the HTTP latency and server throughput under load.

These components work together to ensure the system’s functionality is implemented according to the specifications and the performance is within the expected values across different scenarios.

Conclusion

Fluendo extended a Recasting and Recording System by adding a specific set of features in a timely and cost-effective manner. This enables the product to be tailored to the needs of the client’s projects, turning it into the best fit for each use case.

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