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Here's a doc describing the basic architecture: https://docs.google.com/a/rapt.fm/document/d/1EpiKZG7MTNgc4_ZLagiPaObfVqN9F6XHMpq7m9dzLhU/edit https://docs.goog

Here's a doc describing the basic architecture: https://docs.google.com/a/rapt.fm/document/d/1EpiKZG7MTNgc4_ZLagiPaObfVqN9F6XHMpq7m9dzLhU/edit https://docs.google.com/a/rapt.fm/document/d/1EpiKZG7MTNgc4_... Battlestar Raptica is more distributed than described in this doc, though (some prominent local rappers visited us tonight).

zaroth 13y ago
Really informative write-up, thanks for posting that! One thing I didn't see is how video is encoded and routed, although perhaps this is all decided by your using opentok. I assume video goes from rapper to your opentok server and then out to each client. Does opentok handle multi-bitrate encoding and that sort of thing to support a wide range of clients? Would love to hear more about how much work it was getting the video to be "good enough" versus how much went into the rest of the functionality (matching, voting, UI, JavaScript) Can you give any broad idea of what you're spending on infra and how many battles/viewers you can host at that cost?
- jamespitts 13y ago
  Opentok is really the best way to do this right now, if you're small and trying to build something creative with real-time video. I am guilty of treating their system as a black boxen though. I know it from the API which gives you a lot of flexibility about how video streams are shared, who gets to publish, and who can record. We've been putting in various optimizations to reduce our costs (now that we got it basically running well enough to elicit a suspension of user disbelief). Without revealing too much, it is running in the low dollars per hour range to support users in the hundreds per hour range. Also, I built a way to manage amazon EC2s using perl and rex. Definitely check this out, it is really easy to deal with. http://rexify.org/api/index.html http://rexify.org/api/index.html

zaroth 13y ago

Really informative write-up, thanks for posting that! One thing I didn't see is how video is encoded and routed, although perhaps this is all decided by your using opentok. I assume video goes from rapper to your opentok server and then out to each client. Does opentok handle multi-bitrate encoding and that sort of thing to support a wide range of clients? Would love to hear more about how much work it was getting the video to be "good enough" versus how much went into the rest of the functionality (matching, voting, UI, JavaScript) Can you give any broad idea of what you're spending on infra and how many battles/viewers you can host at that cost?

jamespitts 13y ago
Opentok is really the best way to do this right now, if you're small and trying to build something creative with real-time video. I am guilty of treating their system as a black boxen though. I know it from the API which gives you a lot of flexibility about how video streams are shared, who gets to publish, and who can record. We've been putting in various optimizations to reduce our costs (now that we got it basically running well enough to elicit a suspension of user disbelief). Without revealing too much, it is running in the low dollars per hour range to support users in the hundreds per hour range. Also, I built a way to manage amazon EC2s using perl and rex. Definitely check this out, it is really easy to deal with. http://rexify.org/api/index.html http://rexify.org/api/index.html