@mux/ai

Wes, the people must know.

Who are you and

what do you do?

Hey, uh, my name is Wes Boss.

I'm a full-stack developer,

and I do, I do two things.

I, I create training courses

on web development and,

and I have a podcast called

Syntax and we have a YouTube

channel, and that's more

content around learning web

development and keeping up

with what's going on with

the web development scene.

What are some of the,

uh, video courses

that you work on?

Man, I have a whole bunch

of courses, um, ranging from

backend, Node.js, React.js.

Um, probably my most

popular ones revolve

around just learning

straight up JavaScript.

I have a free one called

JavaScript30, which I

think over half a million

people have taken it.

And then I have a, a

paid one, which is called

Beginner JavaScript, and

those are just sort of two

pillars in learning how

to code, learning how to

build stuff in JavaScript.

Uh, you've recently migrated

your content over to Mux,

but before that you were

using Vimeo for a while.

At what point did you

start to hit friction

or any bottlenecks

with that solution?

Yeah, so when I first looked

for a video solution, this

is probably 10 years ago, um,

I needed something that you

could, I could embed into my

custom course platform, right?

And like, like YouTube's

not a good option because

that's, it's kind of public

and you can make 'em private,

but that's not really,

uh, not really the move.

I wanted to be able to

lock it down to, um, only

provide access to those

who have paid for it.

So I threw 'em

up all on Vimeo.

I had the $200 free.

And then of course they

came knocking like a year

later and said, "Hey, like

you're, you're not allowed

to use the $200 plan for

private courses, right? So

you have to pay us now."

And, and my bill went from, I

think it went from 200 bucks

a year to $10,000 a year.

Um, which was a

pretty big shocker.

At the time I was just

like, you know what?

Pay the man.

And like, this is not

something I'm really

focusing on, um, right now.

As much as I love

infrastructure and, and

working on the course

platform, um, I also

need to spend time

working on the content.

Right?

Um, so I just felt like

I was getting squeezed.

Where my bill kept

going up, I wasn't

really getting anything.

You can, you can see that

infrastructure in general

is getting cheaper for, for

a lot of people out there,

and I was just like, man, I

gotta get, I gotta get off

of this Vimeo because it's,

it's costing way too much.

And also like the embed

platform was, was kind

of hard to control.

There wasn't a whole lot of

like, um, back and forth.

I remember I had one

issue where you couldn't

catch embed errors.

There was like one Chrome

extension that was blocking

the embed and, and that

would throw an error,

and there was no possible

way to catch that error.

To know that the embed had

had failed and I was just back

and forth on their, on their

GitHub, and it took like nine

months to just get a catch

method added to their SDK, um,

which was really frustrating

because people would, it

caused me a lot of support.

People would, "Hey, your

website's not working," and

it's like, now you have this

weird Chrome extension, it's

fine, but I, I should at least

be able to programmatically

alert you and let you know.

So just little things like

that that kind of, kind of

pushed me the wrong way.

Being able to restrict them

to a specific domain name was

another, um, pain of mine.

Because you had to like create

these like obtuse rules where

you could say, this video

can only be embedded on this

domain name, but like then

when you're running in local

development, you have to add

all of those domain names

and then like, I dunno, I

have I've I've got like, like

15 courses and they're all

on different domain names.

So if I want, I wanna like,

do that for production,

and for development.

It was just a huge pain in

the butt to, to have, to

maintain all of that stuff.

I did build, uh, my own

ingest platform, um, as just

a proof-of-concept and, and

hosted it on Cloudflare,

uh, just to see, 'cause

Cloudflare has this thing

where it's free bandwidth

and um, but you can't like,

you, you still have to like

chop them all up into all the

different segments and all

of the different resolutions

and figure out your own

bit rates and run FFmpeg

and all that type of stuff.

And that was fun to build.

But it's that, that's,

that type of stuff sucks to

maintain, um, and I'm not,

I'm not in that business.

Like I just wanna pay

the man and, and move

and have it work.

I had known about Mux

for a long time, just

Scott Tolinsky, he ran

Level Up tutorials on

it, he, he was a big fan.

In the like developer

community, you want something

that is much more like

targeted at developers.

The move was simply just,

querying my course platform

for all of the courses and

all of the videos and then

sending off a request to,

actually, I didn't even need

to download it, which was,

was really neat because Vimeo

or Mux can slurp up from just

a publicly accessible URL.

So that's one thing I

was very surprised at.

I was like, I'm gonna have

to download, like, like

terabytes of video and

then, and have to re-upload

them, you know, and I've got

fast internet, but that's

gonna be a bit of a pain.

But it was really nice 'cause

I simply just needed to query

the video from Vimeo, get

the, the publicly accessible

URL, um, and then give that to

Mux, and then Mux would then

slurp it up and then return me

a, I dunno, some sort of ID.

And then I would save

that ID, uh, to my course

platform so I could reference

what the new ID was, uh,

alongside the old Vimeo IDs.

Were there any other

features about Mux that you

didn't know about but were,

uh, pleasantly surprised

with after the migration?

The, the access control

was something that I much

preferred and, and was

surprised that I liked it

because in, in order to give

people access to a video

on Vimeo, you simply just

had to, uh, restrict it

to a certain domain name.

Um, and, and with Mux, every

single person, every single

load, I can simply just

generate a, a JWT, and and

say like if they have access

to this video, not simply

that they are on this domain

name and have figured out

how to embed it, because

there certainly could be ways

around that then, then give

them access to the video.

And then I was like,

yeah, that's nice.

But then I also wanna be

able to preview them like

on the Mux dashboard.

And you told me, yeah,

you just create multiple.

What is it?

Playback IDs?

What's the, what's

the word for it?

Playback policies.

Yeah, playback policies.

Which, that was really nice.

Quite honestly, one, one of

the biggest pulls for me was

simply just Media Chrome.

Um, so the player, uh, to

actually play Mux videos,

is, is obviously Media

Chrome, you guys have it.

And I've used Media Chrome

many times not with Mux,

um, which is like, shout

out to you guys for

doing that because you've

made this amazing piece

of technology that you

can use with anything.

And then when it did come

time to actually using it with

Mux it was, was really easy.

Um, and I was able to move

over all of my, like, um,

on progress, on pause,

on play, on speed change.

Like, you know, like I,

I coded the thing to web

standards as close as

possible with Vimeo, and

then all of those methods

moved over so nicely.

To, to the media Chrome.

And then Media Chrome is

awesome because I have

way more control over what

the player looks like and

how it acts versus just

the, the Vimeo one where

you can like, change the

color of the bar and, and

hide some of the icons.

This is my player, and

actually there's one thing

I haven't done yet, is you

see this bar right here, the

like skip ahead 10 seconds,

25 seconds, wide screen?

Um, this bar was, was added

because of limitations

in Vimeo's embed, uh,

meaning that, like, I,

like I literally couldn't

add custom skip buttons

in the Vimeo player.

The, the move was simply

just add a bar underneath

it and, and now I can, I can

do whatever I want and it

should be integrated into it.

But the, the move for Mux

was simply like, just get

the, just get it moved over

first, um, and then once I

have control over it I can

start rethinking what the,

the actual player looks like.

But like, everything just

worked outta the box.

One thing I don't think I had

previously was this little

thumbnail preview when you

hover over top of it, which,

I really like when I'm trying

to look for a specific part.

Um, especially when

you're going through

one of the tutorials.

If you're, if you're looking

at one of the things that

we're building and you

want to pause it when it

gets to a specific point,

it's nice to be able

to see where you're at.

How does your video course,

platform handle and manage

your video uploads to Mux?

Uh, I have the API

integration, so a lot of my

course platform is just like

JSON files because I find it

easier to manage rather than

having to create some sort of

UI and then all of the data of

like, where have, which videos

have you watched and, and all

of that stuff, that stuff's

stored in the database and

attached to specific users.

Um, and then I just, I

just hit a button or I run

a script and it will just

upload 'em all and then

if they've changed it will

upload those, the, the changed

ones and overwrite them.

So yeah, I'm just, just

using a script, which is nice

'cause it keeps everything

in sync much better than

having to do any click ops.

What would you say to someone

who is maybe in the same

situation that you were

on the fence, considering

their options, maybe not

really sure what to do.

Do you have any advice

for that person?

I, I think, like, I'm

kind of bummed that I,

I took so long to do it.

Um, and my hesitation was

that like, I thought it

would be much more work

than it actually was.

Like I was able to run my

Vimeo player and my Mux

player in parallel for several

weeks while I like tested

things and it, it worked

really well, so it's, it was

a surprisingly smooth move

over and I didn't have to

really write a whole lot of

code, uh, to, to, to do it.

Wes, thanks so much for

taking time to chat.

Where can people find

you on the internet?

I am available at wesbos.com,

that's my personal website.

I'm at Wes Bos on, I

spend most of my time on,

on Twitter, but I'm on

all the social networks,

TikTok and Blue Sky

and Instagram as well.

If you go to

wesbos.com/courses, you'll get

a list of all of the courses

that I offer, and then of

course, check us, check us

out at syntax.fm as well.

If you wanna learn, we're

on YouTube, we're on all the

podcasting platforms, and

uh, you can learn a thing or

two about web development.