Introduction

Module 15: Create a Netflix Clone

Transcript

welcome to the first lesson of creating a netflix clone with codename one there are a few things i’d like to talk about in this module but first i want to clarify that this module is relatively short as are trying to focus only on the new things so the netflix clone is less of a clone and more of a proof of concept the clone is much simpler in scope and functionality when compared to previous modules this is intentional i don’t want to repeat things that were better covered in the facebook or uber tutorials but i do want to cover new things i placed most of the focus on the nuances of the netflix ui but i also placed some focus on different approaches for working with spring boot i think these will prove valuable as we go back and look at the stuff we did in the previous modules but first let’s talk about the complexities of video platforms technically they aren’t very complex in fact they are remarkably simple for the most part the biggest problem faced by netflix is scale and that only matters when you reach netflix levels of scale videos and platforms like netflix are generally generated statically before the first request is made that effectively means that servers just serve ready-made files and don’t do complex runtime work there are great tools that pre-process video files such as ffmpeg these tools can be used as native libraries in the server or as command line tools most netflix clones just pre-generate all the video files in the various resolutions bitrate options then the work amounts to picking the right video url the video urls can be further scaled using pre-existing content delivery networks also known as cdns we specifically use cloudflare at codename one but any cdn would do we didn’t cover cdn hosting and literally all of the complexities in the server here we also don’t cover anything related to video processing that’s server logic that falls way outside the scope of a mobile tutorial furthermore a lot of this work can be done completely outside of the server as a separate tool that updates the url’s databases video hosting can be done as a separate microservice and mostly hidden from our main backend logic as a result the content of the application will be mostly hard coded this is important as there is an ip issue with distributing a clone of content which we don’t want to get into we also won’t implement the multi-user and authentication portions of the app we covered all of that rather well in the uber clone and there’s no point of going into this again once all this is removed the server is ridiculously trivial most of this applies to the client ui to we covered almost all of this before so the netflix clone is a rehash of many of those ideas with a new coat of paint the ui is trivial and includes only two forms both of which are only partially implemented there is no reason to go deeper as the their source application isn’t very complicated to begin with you can use the facebook clone as a reference to more elaborate ui once the css is in place implementing the missing functionality in a netflix clone becomes trivial but there’s one bigger mission i chose to use the native player native video playback is actually pretty great it handles everything we need in terms of ui for the video player the problem starts when that mode isn’t enough say we want more control over the behavior of playback code we can’t do much in that mode our control is very limited however native playback is pretty much a turnkey solution for video playback that’s why we picked it it’s a great tool for getting started lightweight is more error prone and powerful a good example is closed captions which we can implement manually in lightweight mode but literally placing by literally labeling and placing labels on top of the playing video that’s very powerful i will create a separate module that will cover lightweight video playback it should be easy to adapt the playback code to make use of that approach the final ui should include these two forms the latter will allow video playback notice that all the videos lead to a hard-coded video url of a spinning earth again due to ip issues thanks for watching i hope you’ll enjoy the rest of the course and will find it educational