Cut videos from Azure Blob Storage

Question

I have a web app that is hosted in Azure; one of it's functionalities is to be able to make a few cuts from the video(generate 2 or 3 small videos of 5-10 seconds from a larger video). The videos are persisted in Azure Blob Storage.

How do you suggest to accomplish this in the Azure environment? The actual cutting of the videos will be initiated by a web job. I'm also concerned about the pricing(within the Azure environment), I'm taking into account the possibility of high traffic.

Any feedback is appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Assuming you have video-cutting code that operates on files through normal I/O: You'd need to download the video file from blob, process it via code (or whatever library you've employed), and then store the result back in blob storage. You cannot reference a blob directly with normal standard IO libraries.

If, however, videos are stored in Azure File storage (which is an SMB layer on top of blob storage, then you will be able to directly manipulate your video files.

Web Jobs run within an App Service (just like Web Apps), so you have access to a certain amount of local disk space (depending on App Service tier) for use. You should have no problem temporarily storing a video file within your web app's disk space, for editing operations.

You asked about cost: Again, assuming you're talking about running code within a Web Job (app service), you're just paying for whatever App Service tier you've chosen.

How you actually do those edit operations is entirely up to you (language, library, etc).

Answer 2

Azure Blob Storage is simply an object store which stores the data. It does not have the capability you're looking for.

Azure Media Service however is the service you should look into. The media served by this service makes use of Azure Blob Storage.

For editing video, may I suggest you take a look at Video Editor Plugin for Azure Media Player. You can read more about this plugin here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/video-editor-plugin/. You can also try it out here: http://ampdemo.azureedge.net/amp_editor.html.