Nicolas Gonzalez - The Bug Hunter's Guide: Unraveling Video Players CMCD implementation in a month

(This is a fine tunning of a talk named: How we were able to create a tool for the video dev community in a month that found bugs in major video players.)
At Qualabs we hosted Montevideo Summer camp this February, it was a community event focused on connection ("CONNECTING THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLABORATION"). We wanted other video devs to join us in our offices in Montevideo, to experience our culture, our summer, our offices, and why not, create something together.
So we asked the community, what ideas are interesting for us to build? What do we need?
We had two very interesting proposals:
Will Law from Akamai proposed a CMCD Validator tool that could help developers adopt the standard easily.
Marco Vidonis from Nimble ape proposed to create an open source hybrid meetup platform.
These projects would be publicly available to everyone who would want to join, develop and learn in the process. Everything about the management of the project would also be public and we would have in person meetings when possible.
The focus of this talk is on the CMCD Validator project since in that month of work, we were able to create a tool that would enable any video developer to use as part of their development flow to incorporate the CMCD standard on the players. Also it would allow us to test any existing implementation of CMCD in the players.
We found interesting things:
Reported CMCD implementation bugs on:
Dash.js
Bitmovin
Shaka player
We proposed changes on the CMCD standard to clear ambiguity.
After the summer camp ended, we kept gathering ideas and optimizations to add to the tool. We kept working on it, now it is able to start analyzing differences between how players handle the different parameters, it has its own analyzer tool integrated with elastic and Kibana and can be used as a "proxy" to be able to capture information from mobile devices. We also used it to build a CMCD course for SVTA, using the tool to generate examples and showcase good practices.
But, what is in it for the devs? The creation of this tool was a great way to involve our developers more into the community. By hosting this event, the devs involved had to be aware of what the community liked, how to ask for their feedback, and how to report bugs on the players with the right information, and how to make the life of other devs easier.
They also learned a lot about specifics for the CMCD standard and how important it is in the ecosystem improving their skills.
For closing this talk, we also want to talk about how we can make this a muscle. We definitely want to be able to create more tools/code in the next iterations of the Montevideo Summer camp. Can we keep creating these in other spaces? Can we start showing the power of the community in all our community events? What more can we create?
This talk was presented at Demuxed '23, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one.