Video Buffering

[djohn]

Hello, I've uploaded a few videos to my alfresco site. That all worked fine but when i try to watch the video it takes up all my network bandwidth. This makes my server extremely slow for me and everyone else who uses it. Would there be any way to limit the bandwidth usage of alfresco or limit uploading/downloading videos within alfresco? 

Thank you

I have attached a picture below. By network i mean internal network, Not internet 

[afaust]

Ideally you would not watch the original uploaded, large video, but configure your Alfresco system to generate a lower resolution preview of the video that then is used to view it from the web user interface. This would limit the bandwith requirement.

Other than that, you would have to look at some network tooling to limit the bandwith use of a single HTTP/TCP connection. Off the top of my hat I don't know about any limites you could use and have never had the need to use one - all users / customers typically want to use most of the available bandwith, and a client overwhelming the bandwith of a server usually just means that the server was not scaled up properly for the expected load.

[douglascrp]

Just to add to Axel Faust‌ answer, you can find the sample files for the video transformation and thumbnail generation inside the alfresco project.

community-edition-old/video-transformation-context.xml.sample at master · Alfresco/community-edition... 

community-edition-old/video-thumbnail-context.xml.sample at master · Alfresco/community-edition-old ... 

[djohn]

‌, Would there be anything that would limit the length of the video that is loaded at one time. Example Youtube: if you have a slow connection it will only load 1-2 minutes in front of the current time in the video.

[afaust · Accepted solution]

AFAIK Alfresco / its integrated video players currently do not support pausable, progessive download and actual on-demand streaming. Even if your video files were optimised for streaming, the players will still download entire files though in best case the playback may start as soon as a sufficient amount has already been loaded. Not a lot of customers / users are managing videos with Alfresco so I do not see much pressure on Alfresco for adding YouTube like "as-needed" download behaviour. (Alfresco can't even handle multi-format HTML 5 videos, e.g. providing the browser with alternative formats if it does not support a specific one, which would be way more significant)