How LambdaTest makes it easy to run Browser Automation

At AVEQ we’re measuring the performance and quality of web pages, including those that play video. It’s in the nature of those pages that they constantly change — be it minor CSS updates or complete overhauls. To ensure that our measurement solutions keep working as intended, we perform regular tests on those websites to see if anything has changed.

We used to do this manually, which was quite time-consuming and tedious. But then we discovered LambdaTest, a cloud-based cross-browser testing platform that made it easy to automate our tests. In this post we’re going to show you how it saved us plenty of time — and how you can use it.

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Adventures in Building Multi-Arch Docker Images with Chrome/Chromium

Docker is great – run the same code on all machines, no setup needed. So they say. But once you go beyond simple Dockerfiles, things start to change.

We recently had the, uhm, pleasure of trying to dockerize Chrome, ideally with support for DRM content. We thought it would be easy — grab the latest version from Google, unpack it, and done. But it turns out there’s a little more to it than that. Especially when you build for multiple architectures. Because now, there’s not just amd64, there is also arm64 (for Apple Silicon Macs) and armv7l, which Raspberry Pi uses (sometimes called armhf).

In this post, we are going to explore what is needed to create a multi-arch Docker image with Chrome (or Chromium). If you want the TL;DR version: Use Chromium and Debian, which makes it possible to build multiarch images.

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Network Performance Tests made easy with our QoS Dashboard

If you are operating a network or serving your traffic over different networks, ensuring performance and stability is likely one of your most important goals. Our Surfmeter Analytics Dashboard allows you to set up various visualizations of network and service performance, with possibilities to compare across different networks, regions, devices, or services.

In our previous post, we already showed you how our Analytics Dashboard can help you analyze the Quality of Experience of video streaming services — but we also offer in-depth metrics on underlying network performance. In this post we’ll focus on other metrics:

  • Web browsing speed
  • Ping & DNS performance
  • Speed test results / throughput

… as well as the various customizations that are possible with our Dashboard.

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Compare your Services — with our QoE Comparison Dashboard

Do you have a good MOS for your video streams?

Do you operate a streaming service and want to understand how your offering compares against competitors? Are you a network operator who needs to know whether OTT platforms operate well for your customers?

Set up our dashboard for different services, OTTs, ISPs, content streams — and start monitoring! Our analytics suite will give you three unique features:

  • A composite MOS — to understand the overall service quality at a glance. We use advanced QoE models to calculate the MOS for video streams.
  • All the important KPIs — to be able to drill down to pinpoint issues. All the metrics are there, such as stalling or video resolution and bitrate.
  • Direct comparisons between services and operators — easily configurable to show what you need.

Read on to find out more about how you can set up our dashboards to your liking. In this post we’ll focus on video streaming.

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Video Quality Models from ITU-T — An Overview

A 3-minute introduction into video quality standards by ITU-T.

Originally recorded for a hybrid conference, we’d like to share this topic. Our CEO Werner Robitza has recorded a short summary about the current standardization efforts at ITU-T for monitoring HTTP adaptive streaming quality. These include the P.1203 and P.1204 recommendation series. Those models have been (co-)developed by members of Ilmenau University of Technology and AVEQ in coorperation with Deutsche Telekom — and so we’re happy to give you a small introduction.

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Cloud Gaming QoE measurements on 5G and DSL — how fast is good enough?

If you’ve followed tech news in the past years, you will have probably noticed cloud gaming as one of the new and emerging trends. With platforms like GeForce Now (NVIDIA), Stadia (from Google), or PlayStation Now (from Sony), you can access gaming content without having to own expensive gaming equipment. The gaming providers simply send a pre-encoded video to your machine — all you have to do is play the game.

But how good is the quality of such solutions? It certainly depends on the implementation of the app itself, but also on your network conditions. This is why we at AVEQ developed a solution to measure the quality of cloud gaming — we did it together with an ISP and a cloud gaming operator, to fully leverage the knowledge and expertise of all involved parties. Here we describe our solution, the test setup, and how we found out how well 5G and DSL can work for such services, including what ranges of latency to expect.

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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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