/reeltime

A Video Blogging Application

Primary LanguageGroovyApache License 2.0Apache-2.0

ReelTime: A Video Blogging Application

Logo

ReelTime is a video blogging social media application that allows users to create 2 minute videos and collect them in custom playlists called reels. Each reel can contain videos created by the user, videos created by other users or a mix of videos.

The original idea of ReelTime belongs to Michael Carusi. All implementation work has been done by Bobby Vandiver.

This project is provided as-is.

Clients

See the ReelTime iOS repository.

Running Locally

To run locally, the FFPROBE and FFMPEG environment variables should be set with the absolute paths to the ffprobe and ffmpeg binaries provided in the external directory at the root of the project.

FFPROBE="./external/ffprobe" FFMPEG="./external/ffmpeg" ./gradlew run

Terminology

The following defines terms in the context of the application. These are represented by Grails domain classes within the application.

  • Activity

    • An event that can occur, e.g. "Joe added a new video to his Super Cool Vlogging Reel".

  • Audience

    • A group of 0 or more users following a reel.

  • Audience Member

    • A user who is following a reel.

  • Follower

    • A user who is following another user.

  • Followee

    • A user who is being followed by another user.

  • Playlist

    • An HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) playlist for a video.

  • Reel

    • A playlist that contains videos grouped by theme, e.g. "My Wonderful Life Reel".

  • Segment

    • An HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video segment.

  • Thumbnail

    • A small thumbnail of a video.

  • Video

    • A two minute video blog entry.

  • User

    • A user who can create videos, watch videos and/or collect videos within in a Reel.

(Brief) Technical Notes

ReelTime started life as a Grails 2.x application and was later upgraded to run on Grails 3.x.

ReelTime is designed to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverage the Elastic Transcoder Service for turning storing MP4 video files in S3 and turning them into proper HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video stream. When running locally, ReelTime can leverage ffmpeg and the local file system to support the same workflow.

All endpoints in ReelTime are secured using OAuth 2.0 via the Grails Spring Security OAuth 2.0 Provider plugin. A client discovery endpoint is supported to facilitate the registration of unique clients that are scoped to the user.

The included FunctionalTestPlugin provides support for running the comprehensive suite of functional tests against either a local instance of the application or a remote instance running else where. See also the reeltime-deploy project for the tool that was used to provision and deploy a scaled-down acceptance test environment in AWS.

The source code along with the automated tests should be sufficient to understand how the system is designed to work.