What is Synedrio?
Synedrio is a platform owned by Write System S.r.l. for live and on demand streaming of decision-making assemblies. It is equipped with video archiving, indexing and subtitling capabilities. Synedrio is a complex ecosystem consisting of the public website, a backoffice and an area reserved for certain types of users.
Objectives #
Synedrio is the complete remake of an existing service, used by several Italian municipalities. The process undertaken was that of a complete re-engineering of the product, in order to make it qualifiable by AGID as "Software as a Service" (SaaS) for Italian public administrations.
The ultimate goal was therefore to design and implement a new front-end, also with a view to improving the user experience, and a new back-end coupled through the APIs exposed by the latter.
Solution #
To meet the new needs we have studied a "full responsive" solution by exploiting the potential of React, the JavaScript library for creating user interfaces developed by Facebook.
The development phase was preceded by a UX Design activity in which the requirements of the new product were thoroughly analyzed.
Synedrio is a multi-tenant platform, created as a Single Page Application using the APIs made available by the new back-end that we manage through RESTHeart, our product of excellence.
How are the various services offered by Synedrio managed? #
The videos made available live and on-demand by the platform are recorded through OBS and the stream is sent to the streaming service Wowza. The Back Office Application sends the commands to start, suspend and end the recording to the configured encoding system.
Through the backoffice application, a manager can start the live transmission of a video, index the video by uploading any documents or associating links to the various items and, at the end of the transmission, can upload the subtitles associated with the videos, modify the index and decide whether to publish or de-publish each recording.
At the same time, a user who opens the website sees the homepage configured based on the presence or absence of a live assembly. The page in fact changes favoring the focus on live, if present, or on the latest events broadcast.
Synedrio is also an archive #
All recorded and broadcast videos are archived. Synedrio offers all users the possibility of carrying out a search, more or less advanced based on the plan owned by the tenant they belong to, in the archive.
By entering information such as time band, keyword, groups, speakers,... the system proposes to the user, through a cross-search, all the videos that respond to the request.
Synedrio is also an editor #
Some users are offered with the opportunity to access the backoffice area dedicated to video cropping.
After carrying out a search, the user can proceed to crop the part of the video of their interest. He can later download it and then share it.
However, this is not the only way to disseminate parts of recordings: it is in fact available to all users to share specific index entries on social networks from the video viewing page.
Technologies #
Synedrio is a product built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, using ECS, Lambda, ALB, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, SNS services.
- UI created with React.js
- Java backend and REST API made with RESTHeart
- Video capture via OBS
- Video post-processing via AWS Elemental MediaConvert
- Video streaming managed by Wowza
- MongoDB application database on cloud MongoDB Atlas