Introducing on page caching

At the moment we have done various features related to caching. Some to prevent cache from interfering with the fresh content, making sure that you always get the latest video even if it was just re-recorded. On other side to use caching so that the videos are not always downloaded from our servers. Today we introduce another improvement on caching that would help with the videos not being retrieved from our servers.

So far, if you had recorded the video and had a player shown on the same page with the same video and if this is not shown in the same embedding, then you would see the video to be downloaded. From now, this can be prevented.

Our new on page caching system will allow the recorder to add the reference to the video into the global, on page cache that the player can use. As the player is set to play some video, it will first check the cache and then if not available, check out the server to get the content.

So why is this important for you?

Well the difference is that you will not be charged for this type of playback. After all the playback comes from the cache within the browser and not from our servers. This is ideal since in most cases once the recording is done the video data is already available within the page memory.

When this cache is used, the video playback also starts instantly. This is of course because there is no download that your end users would need to wait (even if it is just a fraction of second).

If the video is too large and browser decides to remove some parts of it, that is fine. With this new feature you will only download the parts that the browser is missing.

How do I get to use it?

This is very simple really. On your recorder that you want to cache the video that gets recorded, you would just add cache parameter. As you do, it will immediately set your video into the on page cache.

To use the cache to find the video your player embedding would need to have use-cache parameter set. Nothing else is needed for this to work.

The caching will work for media played using the token as well as for those using the keys.

To have it available you will need to use the latest (r41) revision of our JS SDK.

Why not make it default?

We consider this a great new feature that can help boost the experience of the person recording the video. That said, we also see it as a new feature and possibly a feature that might need few tweaks at this early stage. As always our goal is to create interesting and powerful features that will help you, without introducing something that might change your existing workflows.