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Fascinating article. Forgive me for being ignorant about this, but how often do they need to encode video? I would think that it's only done when new titles ar

by n0us 11y ago

Fascinating article. Forgive me for being ignorant about this, but how often do they need to encode video? I would think that it's only done when new titles are added to streaming, and once the video has been encoded into all the required formats they would be done with it. Sure, there is a lot of video content out there to be encoded but it isn't unlimited. Is serving the content and providing the recommendation engine to users at scale not a greater challenge than encoding the video?

kyriakos 11y ago
Its another one of their challenges. Time is an important factor, encoding high quality video is time consuming, multiply that by the many bitrates and codecs it could mean that they need to delay their content availability by days.
- jfb 11y ago
  When I built a similar system (for a large consumer electronics company) we built parallel paths for high-priority content; we'd intelligently split the incoming mezzanine and distribute the 90-120s chunks to a farm of systems, while also completing the multi-pass encodes. When the latter finished, the system would swap them. Because of the business model, we never ran this in full production mode, but it was built and ready to go.
mkagenius 11y ago
Yes, encoding needs to be done only once. Generally it would take 2-3x of original duration of video to encode a source into a 1080p, so I am not sure why they take full 1 day? unless they do each bitrate serially which I think is not as hard to parallelize as it is to parallalize single bit rate by chunking. Yes, I believe serving is lot harder, but serving is almost a solved problem since people are dealing with for long time.
- mkaufmann 11y ago
  For x264 that is true, HEVC which is also mentioned is much slower. For a 4k source transcoding can take more than a second per frame. For a normal movie this can quickly result in encoding times of more than a day. Another problem is that you have to encode the movie for each codec profile times the number of different bitrates per profile. The article mentions four profiles (VC1, H.264/AVC Baseline, H.264/AVC Main and HEVC) and bitrates ranging from 100 kbps to 16 Mbps. Assuming now there are 20 different bitrates per code you already get 4*20 => 80 encoded copies per source. But of course this can be solved by parallelism.
  - sorenjan 11y ago
    Are there any codecs that can output multiple versions of an input at the same time? Seems like a lot of the encoding process (like motion estimation) is the same every time, so why do it once for every output instead of reusing it?
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      That would be interesting to know. A lot of transcoders can make multiple passes over the source, so being able to reuse the meta data generated for subsequent passes at different output qualities might help speed up the process. I dunno, not my forte, just thinking out loud.
    - astrange 11y ago
      It's not worth it, because every single decision ends up depending on your output targets anyway. (You can't afford accurate motion estimation at low bitrates because you can't fit the accurate info in your budget anyway. Except for when you can.)
- ksec 11y ago
  Well do they not get re encode once in a while? I am pretty sure the x264 encoder now is significantly better then the one 3 - 4 years ago. Same goes to HEVC.
  - mkagenius 11y ago
    I doubt that they do. The older streams if it is so old that meanwhile significantly better encoders have come to the market then probably very few people are watching those old streams.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      I'm pretty confident people stream all sorts of old content on Netflix. Why would the longtail not be a thing for Netflix?
    - jfb 11y ago
      I would be shocked if they didn't roll their catalog. Maybe not the whole thing every time, but pulling their sources and re-encoding the complete suite when a new bitrate/codec combination comes on line seems like a sensible use of resources.
- garblegarble 11y ago
  >I am not sure why they take full 1 day? unless they do each bitrate serially which I think is not as hard to parallelize as it is to parallalize single bit rate by chunking. I think the talk I know this from is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQrsz3BrfwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQrsz3BrfwU - they chunk not only for encode but also for QC (and QC validation on the resulting transcoded asset). If memory serves the talk also discussed the long transcode time, because their transcoder (EyeIO at the time and I have not heard differently since) is optimised for efficient packing over performance
jedberg 11y ago
There are lots of reasons a reencode might be needed. For example, a new compression algorithm is developed, a new device is supported with a new codec, a new way of giving users a faster startup is developed, etc. Basically any change to the way video is delivered over the internet could trigger a full or partial reencode of the entire library.

by n0us 11y ago

kyriakos 11y ago

Its another one of their challenges. Time is an important factor, encoding high quality video is time consuming, multiply that by the many bitrates and codecs it could mean that they need to delay their content availability by days.

jfb 11y ago
When I built a similar system (for a large consumer electronics company) we built parallel paths for high-priority content; we'd intelligently split the incoming mezzanine and distribute the 90-120s chunks to a farm of systems, while also completing the multi-pass encodes. When the latter finished, the system would swap them. Because of the business model, we never ran this in full production mode, but it was built and ready to go.

mkagenius 11y ago

Yes, encoding needs to be done only once. Generally it would take 2-3x of original duration of video to encode a source into a 1080p, so I am not sure why they take full 1 day? unless they do each bitrate serially which I think is not as hard to parallelize as it is to parallalize single bit rate by chunking. Yes, I believe serving is lot harder, but serving is almost a solved problem since people are dealing with for long time.

mkaufmann 11y ago
For x264 that is true, HEVC which is also mentioned is much slower. For a 4k source transcoding can take more than a second per frame. For a normal movie this can quickly result in encoding times of more than a day. Another problem is that you have to encode the movie for each codec profile times the number of different bitrates per profile. The article mentions four profiles (VC1, H.264/AVC Baseline, H.264/AVC Main and HEVC) and bitrates ranging from 100 kbps to 16 Mbps. Assuming now there are 20 different bitrates per code you already get 4*20 => 80 encoded copies per source. But of course this can be solved by parallelism.
- sorenjan 11y ago
  Are there any codecs that can output multiple versions of an input at the same time? Seems like a lot of the encoding process (like motion estimation) is the same every time, so why do it once for every output instead of reusing it?
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    That would be interesting to know. A lot of transcoders can make multiple passes over the source, so being able to reuse the meta data generated for subsequent passes at different output qualities might help speed up the process. I dunno, not my forte, just thinking out loud.
  - astrange 11y ago
    It's not worth it, because every single decision ends up depending on your output targets anyway. (You can't afford accurate motion estimation at low bitrates because you can't fit the accurate info in your budget anyway. Except for when you can.)
ksec 11y ago
Well do they not get re encode once in a while? I am pretty sure the x264 encoder now is significantly better then the one 3 - 4 years ago. Same goes to HEVC.
- mkagenius 11y ago
  I doubt that they do. The older streams if it is so old that meanwhile significantly better encoders have come to the market then probably very few people are watching those old streams.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    I'm pretty confident people stream all sorts of old content on Netflix. Why would the longtail not be a thing for Netflix?
  - jfb 11y ago
    I would be shocked if they didn't roll their catalog. Maybe not the whole thing every time, but pulling their sources and re-encoding the complete suite when a new bitrate/codec combination comes on line seems like a sensible use of resources.
garblegarble 11y ago
>I am not sure why they take full 1 day? unless they do each bitrate serially which I think is not as hard to parallelize as it is to parallalize single bit rate by chunking. I think the talk I know this from is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQrsz3BrfwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQrsz3BrfwU - they chunk not only for encode but also for QC (and QC validation on the resulting transcoded asset). If memory serves the talk also discussed the long transcode time, because their transcoder (EyeIO at the time and I have not heard differently since) is optimised for efficient packing over performance

jedberg 11y ago

There are lots of reasons a reencode might be needed. For example, a new compression algorithm is developed, a new device is supported with a new codec, a new way of giving users a faster startup is developed, etc. Basically any change to the way video is delivered over the internet could trigger a full or partial reencode of the entire library.