How Facebook encodes videos

Re:How Facebook encodes videos by thefourthchime on Sunday April 25, 2021 @08:08PM (#26937985)

I can’t speak for all of the encoding options. But I can tell you that Dolby Hybrik, one of the main competitors and encoding space uses relatively cheap ec2 instances.

Based on the speed I see from Telestream and Elemental. I think they’re software based as well

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Re:How Facebook encodes videos by cobookman on Monday April 26, 2021 @12:43AM (#26939311)

Youtube and Facebook have a much different encoding problem then say HBO/Netflix/Hulu...etc

YT & FB have a few popular videos, and a ginormous long-tail. That long-tail needs to be encoded, and cheaply as it might not get many views.

The TV/Movie VOD over IP industry stands to benefit optimizing the encoding to have the smallest filesize with highest quality. Spending considerable CPU cycles to find that best quality path.

For those like Netflix, why would you invest with ASICs. You likely don't have a huge infra bill (relatively) when it comes to encoding. And CPU vs ASICs, the ASICs mean you loose flexibility to really fine-tune the quality and use the latest codecs.

For those like YT/FB. You just gotta encode that long tail. Getting something cheap that's 80% the quality of CPU-based encoding is good enough for 99% of the content.

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Re:How Facebook encodes videos by mnt16 on Monday April 26, 2021 @02:40AM (#26939902)

Elemental is a mix of software and hardware encoding. They utilize GPU’s for some portion on the encode.

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