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What I'm curious about is the actual hardware behind video sharing sites. Like how can Streamable,Reddit,Twitter encode such a massive amount of videos at scale

What I'm curious about is the actual hardware behind video sharing sites. Like how can Streamable,Reddit,Twitter encode such a massive amount of videos at scale. Do they have GPU farms? Dedicated hardware encoding hardware that us mortals can't buy? I left out YT on purpose because they have practically endless money to throw at the problem.

ggregoire 5y ago
Just for reference, I've got a server with a single RTX 2080 that reencodes 32 HD streams in parallel with NVENC and the GPU is used at only 10%.
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
the last I checked the video metadata streamable is just using ffmpeg
GeneticGenesis 5y ago
Great question! The real answer is it varies, but for H.264, most just encode on software right now, because GPUs are expensive (especially in the cloud), and the failure rates are really high (if you try to build your own). ffmpeg and lib264 is really fast on modern hardware with decent X86 extensions. It's also worth noting that YouTube also now builds its own transcoding chips [1], and AWS just launched a dedicated transcoding instances based on Xilinx chips: [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build... [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/vt1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/vt1/
dmw_ng 5y ago
Software can be done at utterly stupid multiples of realtime at SD resolutions with only a few cores, depending on your quality target. Cores are very cheap Fancy GPUs tend to support 8 or more HD streams, even consumer cards using patched drivers. Then you have dedicated accelerator hardware, these can pack a tremendous amount of transcode into a tiny package. For example on AWS you have vt1 instances which support 8 (or 16?) simultaneous full HD/SD/QHD ladders at 2x realtime for around $200/mo. In answer to your actual question, at least YouTube selectively transcodes using fancier/more specific methods according to the popularity of the content. They do the cheap thing in bulk and the high quality thing for the 1% of content folk actually watch
londons_explore 5y ago
Nearly all big sites just use ffmpeg and no hardware acceleration.

ggregoire 5y ago

Just for reference, I've got a server with a single RTX 2080 that reencodes 32 HD streams in parallel with NVENC and the GPU is used at only 10%.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

the last I checked the video metadata streamable is just using ffmpeg

GeneticGenesis 5y ago

Great question! The real answer is it varies, but for H.264, most just encode on software right now, because GPUs are expensive (especially in the cloud), and the failure rates are really high (if you try to build your own). ffmpeg and lib264 is really fast on modern hardware with decent X86 extensions. It's also worth noting that YouTube also now builds its own transcoding chips [1], and AWS just launched a dedicated transcoding instances based on Xilinx chips: [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build... [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/vt1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/vt1/

dmw_ng 5y ago

Software can be done at utterly stupid multiples of realtime at SD resolutions with only a few cores, depending on your quality target. Cores are very cheap Fancy GPUs tend to support 8 or more HD streams, even consumer cards using patched drivers. Then you have dedicated accelerator hardware, these can pack a tremendous amount of transcode into a tiny package. For example on AWS you have vt1 instances which support 8 (or 16?) simultaneous full HD/SD/QHD ladders at 2x realtime for around $200/mo. In answer to your actual question, at least YouTube selectively transcodes using fancier/more specific methods according to the popularity of the content. They do the cheap thing in bulk and the high quality thing for the 1% of content folk actually watch

londons_explore 5y ago

Nearly all big sites just use ffmpeg and no hardware acceleration.