Mux App brings powerful new video streaming features to Contentful

Please meet our newly beloved Mux Player

If you were unable to make it to The Mux Informational (TMI), we are sorry we missed you. Fear not; the entire program is available on demand!

One of the things we announced was the introduction of Mux Player - a modern video player deeply integrated with Mux Video and Data, designed with ease of use, customization, and flexibility in mind.

With our latest updates to the Mux Contentful App, Contentful users will enjoy a host of benefits that the Mux Player provides. Let’s talk about all of the new features available in our latest release.

The UI not only looks at home, but enhances your workflow

When it comes to user experiences, looks matter. That’s why we made it easy to change the look and feel, style, and functionality to suit your use case(s) and brand. For the Mux Contentful App, we’ve chosen a theme that feels right at home in the Contentful Dashboard.

We hope you enjoy the timeline scroll and image posters which will help you quickly discern the content of the streaming video before programming it into your multi-screen experiences. Is your video captioned? You can now preview the closed caption(s) for the video right in the Contentful dashboard.

Mux Data “just works”

Data is the foundation of building great video experiences. Mux Player bundles Mux Data for you so you can get the data you need to understand user engagement on your videos and improve the video quality for your viewers including your Contentful users.

Measuring previews of streams generated within the Contentful dashboard gives you instant metrics in your Mux Data Dashboard allowing you to verify your reporting prior to publishing streaming video assets live.

Don’t worry, views generated from within the Contentful dashboard may be easily segmented and filtered using the Player Name value Contentful Admin Dashboard.

Ship it!

Like what you see in the preview player? So do we. That’s why we made it easy to get the code!

Click, copy, paste, and deploy to production. and wow your viewers will enjoy the same beautiful playback experience you have; it’s really that easy.

Want to customize the player even more? No problem; there is a guide for that. Want to roll your own in React? We have a package for that too ✅.

We 💗 audio too 🔉

Although Mux is best known for our unrivaled expertise in all things video, we also care deeply about audio too!

With this update we made managing audio within Contentful just a little bit better, and audio files play just as easily as video with the power of Mux Player.

Putting more power into developers’ hands 👷🏿

Mux's streaming video API is built for Developers to allow them to build better video. In this latest update to the Mux Contentful app we have made some highly requested improvements which will make building experiences with Mux and Contentful even easier, faster, and better. Read on to learn about data we have added to the stored video data object.

It’s how long?

Want to display the length of the video but don’t want to make a full request to the stream to get it? You will now find the highly requested duration parameter in the data object; no playback request necessary.

Build better listening experiences 🎼

Wait. You don’t watch audio, do you? Neither do most of us. So you probably want to adjust your layouts to cleanly handle your audio only content. We present to you the audioOnly boolean. Go forth and 🤘🏾.

Settle for nothing but the best (video resolution and frame rate) 🏆

Let’s say last year you uploaded a video to Mux through the Mux Contentful App, but you can’t remember the quality of the Asset you uploaded. The max_stored_resolution and max_stored_frame_rate is here to help. Now you can set the player width and height appropriate for the video’s quality. Don’t worry, Mux will always deliver the best quality stream possible to your viewers.

Keeping tabs 🧾

What version are we on? Yeah, versioning matters. To help you future-proof your apps (because yeah, we are going to keep improving this thing), we added a version number for the data object. You’re welcome ☺️!

P.S. in case you missed it, we are now on v2.

💡 New properties will only appear for newly-uploaded videos. At this time there is not an upgrade process for older videos.

We are speeding and beefing up your workflows 10% - 20%

With this latest update to the Mux Contentful app, we have introduced improvements which will significantly improve your efficiency by speeding up video uploads! How did we do it? We made some crafty tweaks and introduced the latest version on UpChunk. If you are uploading using a fast and stable internet connection you should expect between 10% and 20% faster uploads.

…and some minor housekeeping 🧹

Also included in this update are some other minor, but important updates that we hope you will appreciate.

• Fixed wording to reflect how the app works where “delete” will remove the video from Contentful, but does not delete from Mux

• Update is automatic; Contentful users do not have to update as all updates are handled by Contentful

Here's how you get the latest version

We hope you enjoy the updates and look forward to seeing the creative experiences you build with Contentful + Mux.

To install the Mux Contentful App, you can follow the “Integrate with Contentful” guide on our docs site or head over to the App’s landing page on Contentful.com.

Want to see the code? Check out the repo in Github.

Is there more you would like to see in the Mux Contentful App? Drop us a line and let us know.