The EPiServer Relate Video Gallery Service

The EPiServer Relate Video Gallery Service is one of the lesser known features of EPiServer Relate.  It provides a simple, cost effective, elastic, reliable, and global solution for the encoding and delivery of videos uploaded to EPiServer Relate video galleries by members of your EPiServer Relate community.  

High Level Architecture

The Video Gallery Service consists of the following major components:

• Video Conversion and Thumbnail Service - Encodes uploaded videos into the Flash video format.  Creates thumbnails of the videos to enable moderators to quickly preview the content without the need to watch the entire video.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Hosts and delivers static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for videos are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. The CDN runs on Amazon CloudFront.
• CDN  Provider –  Receives and processes events from the CDN, and relays the information to EPiServer Relate (e.g  upload complete, encoding complete, etc.).  The CDN Provider runs on your web servers.
• Origin Server - An origin server is the location of the definitive versions of your videos that are replicated throughout the content delivery network.  The Origin Server runs in the EPiServer cloud.

Performance & Scalability

Because the CDN is based on Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for popular content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.

Video Encoding Formats

When using the default CDN provided with EPiServer Relate, uploaded videos are encoded to the Flash video format. A custom CDN provider can be implemented if you need to encode to other formats.  The following file types can be converted using the default CDN:

• Container Files - AVI, MOV, MKV, ASF, MP4, 3GP
• Video Codecs - DivX, Xvid, H.264, WMV, MPEG2, MSMPEG4, Sorensen
• Audio Codecs - MP3, AAC, WMA, AC3

Using other Video Services and Content Delivery Networks

Because the Video Service is provider based, you can either use the default CDN provider or build your own to utilize another service (e.g. Akamai, Limelight, etc.).

Pricing Model

Monthly pricing is based on bandwidth usage per month.

Technical Details

See EPiServer Relate/Community SDK > Additional Content > Developers Guide > How To > VideoGallery for more technical details.