Video: Flash is Dead; What Encoding and Engineering Challenges Await?

蒂姆Siglin: 我们现在正在2016年流媒体西部大会上. Sort of noisy around us, that's because it's during the reception time. This is Almost Live and we've got Jeff Tapper, Senior VP of Engineering at Viacom.

So Jeff, at 流媒体 East in May you just had gotten into the role there at Viacom. 你已经在里面呆了几个月了. 你在干什么??

杰夫攻丝机: A lot of interesting things are going on within our space at Viacom. My team is largely responsible for building out the components that are used by all of the brands. 我们制造了视频播放器, AD引擎, 分析, 身份验证, 内容管理. Any of the pieces that everyone can make use of, we build those out.

And then the brands are able to use those within their appliance.

蒂姆Siglin: 所以你明天要做主题演讲. 在主调中你们要讲些什么?

杰夫攻丝机: 有趣的是, I've found that it's really interesting and challenging to bring an engineering culture to a big media company. So I'm going to talk about how to build an engineering culture within a big media company, dealing with software engineering and try to work in the way that the big software companies work and to bring that into a place where it's not traditionally been found.

蒂姆Siglin: 你是在做敏捷还是精益?

杰夫攻丝机: 我们是一个敏捷的商店. 我们有, 在中央团队内部, about a dozen and half different scrum teams running in different directions and so that's all really good. 我们正在尝试引入更多的现代工程实践. Try to build out our services as cloud data services and 12 factor apps and test-driven development.

蒂姆Siglin: One of the things we've talked to a number of people here about is sort of the massive change of mentality of Flash over the last 9 months, Chrome 55不支持.

杰夫攻丝机: 对，在它前面设置障碍.

蒂姆Siglin: 就像Mac OS下的Safari浏览器一样. What's your sense on the continuity of Flash and how we transition to HTML5?

杰夫攻丝机: As you know, I was a longtime Flash developer and spent many years in the Flash world. 我会想念Flash的. I think Flash was a great solution for its day, but its day has passed. 是时候继续前进了. Oddly enough, Chrome's move with Chrome55 makes my life a little bit easier.

蒂姆Siglin: 为什么呢??

杰夫攻丝机: One of the challenges with all of our brands is getting them to all pick up the latest version of our components. 最新的球员和其他的一切. Because the old, 'if it's not broke, don't fix it' kind of mentality...

蒂姆Siglin: And therefore if those are in Flash and people are having to move to HTML5...

杰夫攻丝机: All of the old ones are in Flash we now have an HTML5-only solution that they will have to pick up for better or worse.

蒂姆Siglin: So what are some of the non-engineering technical challenges you see in the industry? HLS is something that we've all sort of saw this de facto standard, but it seems to be multiple flavors of HLS because the multiple flavors of Android et cetera. 你看到了什么样的挑战?

杰夫攻丝机: It's interesting, so we are today at Viacom an HLS everywhere shop. But I am working to extend that and my vision is that we will have HLS H.264 on the Apple platforms and VP9 DASH on most of the browsers and the Android platforms and we'll do HEVC where that's natively supported, but we don't have those decoders on any of the browsers yet.

蒂姆Siglin: 当Android原生支持HLS时，为什么要在Android上使用VP9 DASH?

杰夫攻丝机: HLS VP9工作得不是很好. 我想把钱存起来, 较小的文件大小, I want to go get my 1080p file size down and so I can't do that in the HLS ecosystem.

蒂姆Siglin: 你还看到了什么挑战?

杰夫攻丝机: Trying to get ahead or at least catch up on VR and AR and IOT and all of these new things. So we've got little teams experimenting and trying to figure out what do they mean to us? 我们如何，我们如何以一种富有成效的方式使用它们?

现在主要是为了理解这一点, but they're clearly going to be a part of the ecosystem going forward. 我们对它了解得越多越好.

蒂姆Siglin: 你提到了HEVC. 你认为HEVC在行业中有吸引力吗?

杰夫攻丝机: There are still a lot of unknowns with HEVC; there are not a lot of devices that have decoders yet. 专利池还没有确定. 人们还在犹豫是否要真正投资HEVC. 尽管奇怪的是所有的编码公司, 或者所有的编码框都乐于支持HEVC, and nobody supports VP9 unless you're going to fire it up yourself, 这就是我们正在做的吗. I would love to get any of the commercial encoders supporting VP9.

蒂姆Siglin: In terms of the show itself, what are the kinds of things you're looking to learn as well?

杰夫攻丝机: I sat in on a really interesting panel today from some of the Google engineers talking about next-generation codecs, which largely started with VP9 and talking about the open media alliance or AOM, 这很有趣. They also talked about their next-generation audio codecs for 3D spherical audio. 但看到外面还有什么很吸引人.

蒂姆Siglin: 杰夫，和往常一样，很高兴你能来. This is Almost Live at 流媒体 West 2016 with Jeff Tapper, 维亚康姆高级工程副总裁.