Bitmovin Partners with Vimond for Advanced Encoding Workflows and State of the Art Content Management

Originally published at: https://bitmovin.com/video-cms-vimond/

The volume of content being managed and consumed is an ever increasing number, live video streaming continues to be a key part of video consumption and effective contentment management is essential for every size of business.  In this blog with Paul Macklin (Senior Product Manager for the Bitmovin Live Encoder) we outline and dive into…

question from a customer @paul.macklin
My current CMS has a real challenge with portrait live-video (ie holding the phone vertical). Is this something the combined Vimond-Bitmovin solution might be able to deliver for me?

Hello @Adrian ,
Thank you for the question, it’s a good one. The answer is yes this solution does support that. There’s two aspects to the answer.

  1. The Live Encoder:
    We are able to support any aspect ratio on the input, we detect the SAR (source aspect ratio). We highly recommend that source content is presented to our distribution encoder in the intended presentation format for the platform the end users use, but some filtering (crop, stretch and squeeze is possible). However it’s worth noting that typically, and in best practice, the video transform filters would be applied in production or post-production.
    For a customer that intending to deliver a portrait 9x16 video to us, we would recommend the Display Aspect Ratio (DAR) is matched on the output video rendition configuration - this provides the best customer experience. In terms of quality.
    This would also be supported by our Live Encoder today.

  2. CMS
    The Vimond folks are free to add more colour to this answer. While it’s true that a CMS will pass metadata relating to the video asset, regardless of aspect ratio, not all CMS vendors are able to preview the content correctly in their players. For most Video CMS (vCMS) users, being able to preview the asset in the CMS is essential and the player used in the Vimond CMS is able to present the content correctly.

Cheers, Paul, and you are 100% correct. Our users can preview all the content in our Video Player within the CMS. You can find the video player in VIA as part of the asset header. Users can configure how the video player will work by default. Toggling on the Always Autoplay Videos, the videos will start to play automatically whenever an asset page loads in VIA. We have a film-roll icon that is visible whenever more than one video format is available for playback on a single asset, with DASH and HLS being the default video source options. If you have manually uploaded one or more subtitle files to the asset or have embedded subtitles in your video stream, a T icon will show up in the player controls, allowing you to select which subtitle to preview in the player. If no subtitles are linked to the video, the T icon will not be displayed. For videos with multiple audio tracks, a speech bubble icon will appear in the controls, allowing you to switch between the available audio tracks/languages in the video player.