Project Name: Fabstir Web3 Media Player #2
Organisation: Fabstir
Primary Contact: Jules Lai (Founder and CTO of Fabstir)
Summary:
Additional grant proposal (previous here) to get Fabstir Media Player polished. It is to have a live public platform with the core abilities to stream videos, transcode uploaded videos via Sia peer-to-peer network and tokenise said content for Web3 decentralisation on Polygon Mumbai testnet.
Objectives:
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Cloud Infrastructure Setup: Deploy Fabstir transcoder on a cloud platform with the necessary GPU support. Deploy media player application on CPU cloud node to ensure accessibility and performance.
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Testing and Quality Assurance: Ensure comprehensive unit and integration tests to cover the smart contracts, front end, and any backend peer-to-peer services.
Budget:
The grant proposal is for $37891.02 to support the project’s development over a period of six months. The budget allocation is as follows:
Jules Lai to be full-stack Web3 developer: $26666.67
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GPU & CPU cloud cost $8557.68*
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Hardware/software $1333.33
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Legal/accounting $666.67
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Contingency and Miscellaneous $666.67
Proposed Timeline:
First 3 Months: Core Development and Payment Integration
- Focus on finalising the core functionalities of the dapp, ensuring all features like
video upload, transcoding, and NFT wrapping are polished.
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Ready the development of the dapp’s payment dashboard for transcoding, storage (Sia/S5) and NFT minting fees (Polygon) + running costs.
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Create documentation for media player.
Second 3 Months: Security, Scalability, and Public Access
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Deploy the Rust transcoder and media player to cloud nodes with preliminary testing.
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Package the media player and gallery as an npm module with integration testing.
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Deploy the dapp on testnet production environment.
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Deploy the dapp for live production environment.*
* The core functionality of creating an NFT for video, audio, media, files and data both short and long form plus the ability to stream videos, transcode and upload media with all transcoder features will be live on Polygon mainnet. Some more exotic features that require smart contract audit will be initially disabled.
The platform will run without inclusion into MetaMask’s currently permissioned Snaps marketplace.
Breakdown of GPU & CPU cloud cost
*Preliminary quotes have been gathered from Paperspace for GPU cloud and Hetzner for CPU cloud
ASCII | Calculation | Total | |
---|---|---|---|
GPU cloud | NVIDIA A6000 GPU |
$1.89/h * 24 * 183 | $8300.88 |
CPU cloud | AMD Ryzen™ 5 3600 CPU, 6 cores @ 3.6 GHz |
$42.8/mth * 6 | $256.80 |
Hosted NVIDIA GPU servers have to use professional range of GPUs. For AV1 video encoding, Ada Lovelace architecture is required.
Future benefits to Sia
IPFS and its ecosystem has a stranglehold in the Web3 world when it comes to offline storage off of blockchain. Fabstir Media Player can help build a foothold for Sia from where its competitor (for want of a better word) is particularly deficient; medium to long form video for storage and streaming.
Fabstir gives the option for any of the 1 to 2 million monthly active users of Polygon’s NFT marketplaces to mint video NFT of any length yet
still have the lower quality short video, perhaps used as a trailer or sample, remain compatible to showcase on existing NFT exchanges for trading purposes. Then use Fabstir Media Player to play the film in all its full length and higher quality glory. There is currently no NFT marketplace out there that can trade medium or long form video. This can help bring in more users to Sia’s ecosystem.
Anyone will be able to use Fabstir Media Player as an npm package to build out their own NFT media marketplace dapp or perhaps add to their website pages for whatever use case that would benefit from smooth higher quality video playback using Sia peer-to-peer storage via S5 content-addressed network.
Professional filmmakers may come to know Sia as a quicker and cheaper way to archive their masters and easily add ownership and authentication properties by minting an NFT. Could lead to further use for example, unlocking premium content such as behind-the-scenes content or cast/crew interviews, different edited versions of the film etc.
Having a MetaMask Snaps plugin as one of its first media dapps to its 30 million monthly active users could garner great exposure to Sia’s ecosystem in its role for decentralised storage and attract new users into the ecosystem.
Future expansion to other EVM compatible blockchains would require minimal changes if at all and potentially bring in more users to Sia.
Risks
The live release version of Media Player is intended to run standalone or with MetaMask Flask (developer version of MetaMask and not the standard version so there may be stability issues).
Consensys run an allowlisted Snaps directory of plugins that been audited by third parties as well as the MetaMask team. In their words “MetaMask Snaps Open Beta is a first step to building this permissionless system.”. No date has been given for the permissionless system.
Some risk may lie on S5 in production in terms of how well it copes when scaling up to more users, since it’s a new system.