Walker Frankenberg (Senior Software Engineer): We're the experts in video, and we have a good idea of what the best defaults are and how to manage that on the back end, and making it as easy as possible for our customers to integrate.
Joshua Alphonse (Community Engineer): Mux Robots is your pathway to video intelligence. And now we have a brand new API called Directives, which helps you sequence and stitch together different Mux Robots workflows all together. And we're here with Walker, our senior engineer who has done some monumental work on Directives as well to come chat with us today.
Walker: Yeah, I mean, Directives are... give us the ability to sequence a series of Robots jobs. Instead of having to chain together different API calls, worry about the different states of the jobs as they are completing, you can just create one Directive and assign that to an asset when you upload it, and it'll automatically run all of those jobs. It’ll handle all of the dependencies, and handle all of the the state management for you. And it makes it as simple as just one line of code.
Joshua: Sweet. So like, you know, when you're thinking about Directives, what are maybe like some scenarios you could see a Directive being used inside of an application, either if it’s like a web app, or a mobile app, where do you see that actually taking place?
Walker: Yeah for sure. I mean, there's so many applications. One of the ones that I've seen most commonly is like in a UGC platform.
Joshua: Yeah.
Walker: A customer will upload a video. They want it to have high quality captions and translated into various different languages so that they can have as much reach as possible. Instead of having to run a separate generate premium captions job and four different translate captions jobs separately, you can just have that all in one Directive and run it once, and it’ll automatically upload those all to Mux and have them ready to go in the player with one line of code, where otherwise, it would take a lot longer.
Joshua: Sweet. Now, like, you know there are so many Mux Robots jobs out there. Can you, like, take us through maybe one Directive that you can see someone applying? What's a scenario? Is it, like, just uploading and then going into Directives? Or do you see it being used in some different ways as well?
Walker: Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly one use case, but there are a wide variety of use cases you could use with Directives. You can run them whenever. So even if you're backfilling a list or a catalog of videos and you decide that you want to run a certain set of workflows on a certain set of videos...
Joshua: Yeah.
Walker: you can just run that programmatically through the API that way instead of having to manage each of those workflows individually. So it's not just when uploading videos, but it's whenever you really want to run any sort of Robots job on your video, and you're running multiple of them at the same time, it’s probably a clue that you might want to be using Directives,
Joshua: Before Directives came out I was using like, Laravel queues to stitch together a bunch of Robots jobs, and deal with retries, and just like, you know, the durability of things is really finicky when you're just making singular API calls to different workflows. But, like, how important has that been to this process? Bring me through where your mindset of when you're thinking about the end user or the customer, when you're building with Directives?
Walker: Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a great question. I think, we tried to build the the Robots jobs to be as durable as possible and fault tolerant as possible.
Joshua: Yeah.
Walker: The big one that Directives solves is dependency management. So sometimes customers will not realize that there are certain dependencies that are required for workflows. Like the captions track won't be ready on an asset before they try and translate captions, because the video just got uploaded. Rather than having that job error, which makes sense, you can't translate captions if there aren't any.
Joshua: Yeah.
Walker: But, instead of having to make the customer manage that themselves, having a Directive that automatically will create the captions for you, wait until that captions track is ready and then translate it, makes it super easy. So, you can just have hands off and be able to know that Mux is handling the backend infra for you and letting you get as much value from the jobs as possible.
Joshua: Yeah, it's just like way less for a developer to have to manage and worry about dependencies and so forth. That was like kind of, what I was going through when I was stitching things together with queues, even though they're super powerful, I just kind of wanted someone else to manage that part, so I can worry about some other things in my backend.
Walker: Exactly. And I mean, that's always been the the Mux proposition is that we're the experts in video, and we have a good idea of what the best defaults are and how to manage that on the backend, and making it as easy as possible for our customers to integrate. Sweet. Exactly.
Joshua: Well I mean that's Directives. You know they're super exciting. They’re a way for you to stitch together all of your different Mux workflows for Mux Robots all into one API. And you can also use it on the dashboard too. Yep. So, you don't have to actually write any code with it. But if you want to add it add it to your application, obviously use the API. And yeah. Check out the documentation and some more on Directives with Mux Robots.
