Engineers tend to dread testing their software but I don’t understand why because testing things, especially video on the internet is super fun! I’m fascinated with the fake media and test patterns used and aim to answer these questions in this talk:

Who are the unsung heroes behind bars and tone? Assumed knowledge says Big Buck Bunny is used because it is open source, but is that true? What are the bizarre backstories of test media we rarely give a second thought, like, have you ever visited the website listed in top left of the Netflix test pattern or seen the WebDriver Torso Youtube account? What generates the fake camera streams in WebDriver flavors of chrome, gecko, and safari? This question in particular led me to dig through “”found footage”” in Geckodriver source code in a quest to try to find its slow-rainbow-fill-fade fake media stream that always makes me nostalgic for the FBI warning in the beginning of VHS tapes. Don’t you want to know what other test media I found?? Inspired by these test pattern origin stories, we’ll also cover tips and tricks to automate tests for your WebRTC/live stream app such as how to generate fake media streams via gstreamer, ffmpeg, v4l2loopback, and likely some unholy amalgamation thereof (because it’s fun!). We’ll talk about virtual capture devices at the browser (think `–use-fake-device-for-media-stream` & `–use-file-for-fake-video-capture` in Chromedriver) and (mac)OS level. Finally, we’ll fake out the Web APIs `enumerateDevices` and `getUserMedia` to boot. After this talk, you’ll never look at a test pattern the same way. This talk was presented at Demuxed ’22, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one. Demuxed ’22 was made possible by sponsors like our Platinum sponsor Daily (https://daily.co) and organized by people from Mux (https://mux.com). For more information about the conference and community, see https://2022.demuxed.com.