Gaining control over your viewer’s experience through embed codes
Stream Monkey’s support page has a brand new article I’m super excited about, and wanted to share with you. One of our developers, Geoff Hensley, has written a how-to guide for writing queries that you can add into your embed code to have even more control over your stream.
This means that you can control things like which bitrate your stream starts on, and how long the video segments are that are downloaded as your viewers stream. I’d love to share with you a few specific examples of how having this knowledge at your fingertips can help your streaming game in very a practical way.
Warning: You are about to enter what we at Stream Monkey refer to as Nerd Mode.
This post is for the techy-at-heart. If you’re not comfortable changing your code or find yourself thinking, “I have no idea what they are talking about!” then it might be best to leave the code changes to your favorite neighborhood web tech.
Here are some of my favorite things that you can do with the embed code queries.
Preferred Bitrate Selection:
Stream Monkey’s player is set up by default so that it will always start on the highest bitrate when your viewers log on to watch. Then, if their internet can’t handle the highest bitrate you’re sending, it will adjust down to the largest one it can handle. We set it up like this because if you’re sending a high bitrate, we want as many people as possible to be able to watch your video in a high quality.
Sometimes you may not want it to start on that highest bitrate, however. If you’re getting a lot of complaints that it’s taking people a long time to connect, maybe you want to have the stream start out on a lower bitrate first, connect them quickly, and then move to a higher bitrate later on. For this, you’d use the preferred bitrate selection query.
DVR Flexible Playback:
If you have a DVR stream, you know that you can’t always control when the DVR stream starts and stops for later viewers. With this query, you can use a Unix timestamp and control when you’d like the DVR playback to start when a viewer logs onto your stream. It is essentially a “trim” function for the content in your DVR, and you can set start and stop times.
Segment Duration:
When someone is streaming your content, it downloads the video to their device in segments. It will pull your stream in 10 second increments by default. This is why you’ll notice if you’re watching your stream and the internet goes out, you can usually watch for a little while before the stream actually stops playing. This is also what contributes to a stream delay.
Stream Monkey sets the default to 10 seconds, even though it causes a delay, because it creates the smoothest streaming experience for your viewer. If you would like to cut down on that delay, you can use the segment duration query and shorten the segment length, cutting down on the delay for your stream; just be aware that it may cut down on the quality as well.
This is just a glimpse of all the cool stuff you can do by using queries in your embed code. Check out Geoff’s support article below, and remember you can also control a lot of player controls in the dashboard of your Stream Monkey account.
How to add queries into your embed code (Stream Monkey Support)
Stream Monkey is an online video company focused on simplifying the way users share, connect, and engage with their audience.
