I was talking with a Netflix product manager a few years ago and, IIUC, he said Netflix re-encodes their entire catalog monthly to take advantage of new encoder optimizations. Disk is cheap. They want to optimize network transfers to both save money and improve user experience.
Re:How Facebook encodes videos
by teruakohatu on Monday April 26, 2021 @04:21AM
(#26940439)
Netflix has about 36,000 hours of content. On Youtube that much content is uploaded every 1 hour and 20 minutes! Or to put it another way, Netflix re-encodes every month what YouTube encodes in just over an hour.
Your numbers are off. Netflix has more than 36.000 hours of content.
Re:How Facebook encodes videos
by viciousvoxel on Monday April 26, 2021 @04:04PM
(#26947357)
I don't know the reliability of these sources, but according to one article[1], as of 1 year ago, US Netflix had ~5.8K titles, totaling 36K hours of content. Another more recent source[2] claims that worldwide, Netflix has ~15K titles, so assuming the same distribution of runtimes, it would be closer to 93K hours of content. So, while you're correct, it's still the same order of magnitude.
sources:
[1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...
[2] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/netflix-statist...
Care to cite a source?
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: a slacker suffering from insomnia watching 5 streams of Netflix at once × 20 hours/day × 365 days non-stop would otherwise watch the whole catalog in less than a year.
Convinced?
Not really.
If we unpack your calculation to slightly more typical human behaviour: Watching 1 stream × 10 hours/day × 365 days non-stop, one person would need 10 years to watch the whole catalog.
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
You didn't get the core idea of my calculation: to show that Netflix has times of magnitude more than just 36k hours of content.
FWIW, that conversation about Netflix re-encoding their catalog monthly was from about seven years ago! Their process has surely changed since then. :)
Also, IIUC, they re-encoded about once a month, but the re-encoding didn't necessarily take one month of compute time.
Re:How Facebook encodes videos
by BlueTemplar on Monday April 26, 2021 @08:57PM
(#26950399)
Next codec is likely to be AV1. How does it fare in these situations ?
But also this might be more about protocols, but AFAIK streaming protocols have mostly been abandoned to the favor of chunk downloads over HTTPS ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925307
>It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.
A new video codec is released and adopted once every ten years. So I dont think it would be a problem. Hardware encoding also trade compression quality for speed. And they are compensating it with slightly higher bitrate. It will also reduce their incentives for improving open source encoder.
Although I think even Netflix switched to BEAMR ( Cant really blame them though )
I think the next frontier, for both Audio and Video will be Codec designed with LiveStreaming / Low Latency in mind.
( Or pretty much everything computing, I wish we could focus on latency, from Hardware Input, Display, Network, Disk, etc. Apple is certainly moving in that direction without talking about it. )