Last Instinct

While working at Basilicon, I made a few full browser video intros for Pågen’s sites in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The videos are integrated using a extremely flexible technique that also features instant bandwidth measuring and automatic quality adjustments.

Note: The film itself was not made by me. Only the technique behind it the intro.

I’ve done a few video intros like this before, but these video’s were first off to be featured on a new powerful media server. The server was specially configured at Basilicon with custom scripts to enable lots of customized video features. This solution enables very cost effective fully customized video services for Basilicon’s clients, any way they like. The video is mainly H.264 up to HD quality desktop playback or high quality mobile viewing. Also the videos are controlled by a schedule using a custom built media manager.

At Basilicon, we were recently proud to release a dedicated video player for Thule globally. I have over some years developed a unique video technique for Basilicon which is rather cutting edge. It measures and estimates your bandwidth capabilities in 0.3 seconds and adapts the video to this.

Well, this can be done with any sophisticated streaming server, but this technique does it without the need of a streaming server, which reduces the cost and maintenance significantly. It’s done using Adobe Flash and it’s currently not possible to do in HTML5. It uses H.264 codec, which works like a charm in the latest Flash Player. Even on my old crappy laptop. It also features automatic quality control to optimize performance during playback.

Everything from video coding to player design and setting up the server was done by me. It was a bit nervous to estimate what performance we needed from the server and find a hosting partner that could deliver this for a reasonable price. I chose a cloud VPS for this, which could be upgraded with better performance when necessary. We have not needed to upgrade it yet and I am really satisfied with the performance and flexibility of our hosting. After some fine tuning it now serves 10000+ videos every day perfectly. That number will probably increase a lot later on, but the server has much more to give.