How to do browser automation for videos? Insights from the developer

(This post is part 2 of a small series on our development work.)

If you read our previous post, it should have become clear that it’s not trivial to build automation tests involving video. As we indicated in the article, one of the main issues developers normally stumble upon is gathering the current playout state of a video. If you are an automation engineer or a web developer, you’ve probably already come across a situation where you had to develop a website with video embedded. In this post, we’re going to show you how to radically simplify that process.

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Now arriving in your Test Suite: Automation Testing for Video Playback

(This post is part 1 of a small series on our development work.)

Imagine you are developing a video platform – you want to ensure that your platform works well for all users and that all assets are playable at their highest quality. Normally you’d do this via integration testing of your website – a rather complex task involving tools like Selenium and writing a lot of custom code.

AVEQ’s Surfmeter solution has always enabled video providers to measure the quality of their playouts. Now we’re proud to present our newest solution: video analytics for browser automation testing! With zero configuration needed, all you need to do is add our Surfmeter Test Automation plugin to your Selenium-based tests.

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Measuring the Quality of Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming one of the latest trends in the entertainment industry — customers can gain access to a plethora of game content without needing to buy specialized hardware. Services like NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, Google’s Stadia or Sony’s PlayStation Now render the game at the server side and simply transmit a video stream to the end device. The user sees just a video, but it feels like playing a real game on their end device.

Both cloud gaming providers and Internet Service Providers strive to offer the best experience to their customers, yet the customers often don’t know from where service issues originate. This is why recently an ISP approached AVEQ to deliver a solution to measure the quality of cloud gaming on their networks.

In this article, we’ll briefly describe the requirements for quality measurements, and dive deeper into what we implemented.

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How to measure your video platform’s Quality of Experience?

Video streaming is one of the most important online service offerings. It has become ubiquitous. And content is king. We all agree there is a lot of demand for video – high quality video, delivered flawlessly, without interruptions. But how do all these video streaming providers measure up? Do they, do you deliver the quality and customer experience we all want?

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Does HD content always mean good quality?

When operators say they deliver good quality, they mostly think about the resolution with which a video is encoded. End users also often only think about “HD” indicators. This is right to some degree. Nevertheless, the quality can depend on many more factors.

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How to measure Video QoS and QoE with Surfmeter

Almost everyone knows the most important Key Performance Indicators for video streaming: the time it takes for the video to start, and whether there are any interruptions during playback. You also typically want to know the resolutions that your client receives. However, there are many more indicators that are relevant for determining the overall quality of your streaming service – and ideally you could see the quality reflected in one simple number.

In this post we‘d like to show you how you can leverage our Surfmeter solution to measure video KPIs and Quality of Service (QoS), but also how to use the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE) to find out how a customer would experience a video stream.

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