All Articles (4 articles)

  • DRM Fundamentals for Streaming Media

    Platform Engineering / Media Systems 21 min read

    Digital Rights Management (DRM) for streaming media combines encryption, license management, and platform-specific security to control content playback. This article covers the encryption architecture (CENC, AES modes), the three dominant DRM systems (Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady), license server design, client integration via EME (Encrypted Media Extensions), and operational considerations including key rotation, security levels, and the threat model that DRM addresses.

  • Video Transcoding Pipeline Design

    Platform Engineering / Media Systems 18 min read

    Building scalable video transcoding pipelines requires orchestrating CPU/GPU-intensive encoding jobs across distributed infrastructure while optimizing for quality, cost, and throughput. This article covers pipeline architecture patterns, codec selection, rate control strategies, job orchestration with chunked parallel processing, quality validation, and failure handling for production video platforms.

  • Web Video Playback Architecture: HLS, DASH, and Low Latency

    Platform Engineering / Media Systems 24 min read

    The complete video delivery pipeline from codecs and compression to adaptive streaming protocols, DRM systems, and ultra-low latency technologies. Covers protocol internals, design trade-offs, and production failure modes for building resilient video applications.

  • Image Processing Service Design: CDN, Transforms, and APIs

    Platform Engineering / Media Systems 45 min read

    This document presents the architectural design for a cloud-agnostic, multi-tenant image processing platform that provides on-the-fly transformations with enterprise-grade security, performance, and cost optimization. The platform supports hierarchical multi-tenancy (Organization → Tenant → Space), public and private image delivery, and deployment across AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premise infrastructure. Key capabilities include deterministic transformation caching to ensure sub-second delivery, HMAC-SHA256 signed URLs for secure private access, CDN (Content Delivery Network) integration for global edge caching, and a “transform-once-serve-forever” approach that minimizes processing costs while guaranteeing HTTP 200 responses even for first-time transformation requests.