Video & device engineer · Founder of doitmachina

David Crandall

I’ve spent about 20 of my 24 years in software getting video to play on TVs, set-top boxes and streaming apps, most recently at Charter / Spectrum. I take contract work in streaming playback, devices and DRM.

Email me Read the Inspector Gadget case study →

Shipped on Samsung · LG · Vizio · Xbox · Chromecast · Xumo · Roku · RDK

Two decades of making video work on stubborn hardware

Almost every job I’ve had repeats the same pattern, and it turns out that’s a specialty: the device stack, from the silicon up to the person watching. I’ve worked at every level of it.

Case study

Inspector Gadget

…or, David clones himself, hallucinations and all

A helper program that explains why a video stream went wrong, so the whole team could ask it instead of waiting for me. Under the hood, it could replay one viewer’s bad evening, test a live video feed, read the team’s code, and remember every case it had solved. Handed off with a how-to guide and a startup checklist.

Read the case study →

Problems I’ve run to ground

  • Errors that hit some viewers far more than others. On paused live TV, the warning signs were a burst of bitrate switches and falling memory, well before the error. Recommended, not yet confirmed: double the minimum time between bitrate switches.
  • Stalls right before the ads. A viewer described “three dots before every ad.” Averages showed nothing. Full session timelines showed sub-second stalls right before each ad break.
  • Delivery problems that might not be yours. A late-night issue we believed was upstream. Segment probing and an origin-vs-edge comparison proved it in about two hours.

Where I’ve done it

  1. Jul 2026 → now

    Do It Machina · Founder & Principal Engineer

    Founded Do It Machina LLC in Albuquerque. Its product, slideinto.house, is live: real-estate agents bring listing photos and get back a narrated video, virtually staged rooms and a listing site.

  2. 2016 – Jun 2026

    Charter / Spectrum · Software Engineer VI (from 2017)

    Kept live TV and on-demand video playing in Spectrum’s apps on TVs, game consoles and streaming sticks. Built Inspector Gadget, an AI investigation agent that let the whole team ask the questions I used to answer. Led technical planning and mentored engineers.

    Shipped on Samsung, LG, Vizio, Xbox, Chromecast, Xumo and RDK-based devices, for live TV and on-demand. Players: Shaka and Bitmovin (web and TV apps), AAMP (RDK). Streaming: HLS and DASH (CMAF segments). DRM rollouts: Widevine, PlayReady.

    Contractor from 2016 · employee April 2017 – June 2026

  3. 2014 – 2016

    Delivery Agent / Connekt

    ShopTV: shoppable video on Roku (BrightScript), Samsung Smart TV, Comcast X1 and RDK. Early React/Redux, build and release automation.

Earlier jobs, 2002 – 2014: FortuNet, EchoStar / DISH4 more roles
  1. 2009 – 2014

    EchoStar / DISH

    tru2way / OCAP cable platforms (Java); on-screen diagnostics talking to low-level drivers; C/C++ on embedded Linux.

  2. 2007 – 2009

    FortuNet · contractor

    Embedded development plus C#/.NET front ends, bridging native libraries into application code.

  3. 2004 – 2007

    EchoStar / DISH

    Linux set-top boxes (522, 322, 922) in C at the framebuffer level; OpenTV middleware, debugging down into Broadcom drivers.

  4. 2002 – 2004

    FortuNet

    Embedded Linux 2.4, C, pthreads, framebuffers, and Hauppauge video-capture drivers, back when that was a brave thing to do.

Stack

Video
Streaming / OTT, HLS, DASH (incl. CMAF), DRM, Widevine, PlayReady, Shaka, Bitmovin, AAMP
Devices
smart TV & set-top, Roku, Tizen, webOS, Xbox, Chromecast, RDK
Code
React, TypeScript, C/C++, Python, applied AI
Work
contract, consulting
Not a front-end engineer with some video experience. A media and platform engineer who happens to have built a lot of client apps, and who knows his way around the ugly borderlands between software, hardware, networks and DRM. — my career coach, paraphrased (it was an LLM, naturally)

Side projects

Public on GitHub. Two of them run in your browser.

  • nm_health

    Albuquerque publishes restaurant inspections as one PDF it overwrites every week. This archives every copy and builds a 12-month history for each restaurant.

    Python

  • Return of Dr. Destructo

    Playable

    An open-source remake of a 1987 ZX Spectrum game, ported to run in the browser: the original C++ and Lua compiled with Emscripten, drawn through WebGL. The remake is MaxSavenkov’s; the browser port is mine.

    C++ · WebAssembly · a fork of MaxSavenkov/drdestructo2

    Play in your browser →

  • Loose Orphans

    Playable

    A Final Fantasy VI-style browser RPG about a fictional boy band, and a worked example of making a whole game with AI helpers behind a strict engineering gate, every spend capped and logged.

    TypeScript

    Play in your browser →

  • Burrito Run

    Paused

    NPC experiments and tooling for Streets of Rogue: giving the city’s characters more reasons to do things with each other, plus tools to see and explain what they’re doing.

    C#

  • Roku tools

    2016

    An analytics plugin and a message debugger for Roku channels.

    BrightScript

    behaviorAnalytics →messageDebugBrightScript →

More on GitHub →

Tell me what’s breaking.

I take on consulting and contract work: streaming and device engineering, playback and DRM troubleshooting, and applied-AI builds. Not sure it’s a fit? Ask anyway.

Helpful to include

What’s breaking (player, device or platform) and a rough timeline.

Not technical? Just tell me what’s going wrong in your own words. I’ll figure out the rest.

LinkedIn →GitHub →

How a first engagement goes

  1. You send a few affected sessions or logs.
  2. I report back in writing: where the problem is, and where it isn’t.
  3. You get a plan, plus the tools and write-ups your team can keep using without me.