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FFmpeg Patches for a 20% speedup of Apple ProRes decoding
- cebert 3y agoI’m slightly confused by the title of this submission. Doesn’t this post suggest a 20% speed up on Windows devices? I don’t see Apple mentioned.
- majormajor 3y ago"Apple Prores" is a codec.
- cebert 3y agoThanks for the clarification!
- crooked-v 3y agoFor more context, it's extremely popular for use in film and TV post-production, and is designed specifically for that role (as opposed to the needs of consumer-facing codecs used for disc storage or streaming).
- midasuni 3y agoIf I remember rightly it was “Elvis Presley” who contributed the ProRes codec in the first place. Or maybe I’m thinking of a similar closed codec. There are only a handful of people that really contribute to ffmpeg, yet its codebase runs pretty much the entire video based internet. It’s a marvel of the modern world.
- zerocrates 3y agoYou do remember rightly: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/5554de13b29b9bb812ee5cfd606349873ddf0945 https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/5554de13b29b9bb812ee...
- skywal_l 3y agoI am always impressed by the collective memory of HN commenters.
- tombert 3y agoI genuinely feel like ffmpeg is kind of like a "secret weapon". Occasionally my dad will need some help with video or audio, and he'll see me hack together an ffmpeg command (even on Android with termux in a pinch!) and be utterly astounded. Being able to quickly slice up the video without re-encoding, or being able to stitch video together without a re-encode, or being able to arbitrarily glue a bunch of videos together all of different formats and it will work flawlessly. It's a piece of software I would gladly pay hundreds of dollars for, and yet it manages to be free. I think I'll visit their donate page right now.
- vrosas 3y agoIt’s amazing how many companies are literally just ffmpeg-as-a-service. It wasn’t a ton of money but I saved my last company a few hundred bucks a month they were paying a service to convert .gif files to .mp4
- tombert 3y agoImageMagick as well! At a big social media company I used to work at [1], they were spending a not-insignificant amount of money (in the millions) to their CDN/caching provider just to have images resized and converted to PNG and WebP. I am pretty sure all this CDN was doing was running the image through ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick and calling it a day, and charging absurd quantities of money to do it. [1] it's not hard to find my employment history but I ask you not to say it publicly here
- xattt 3y agoWas this an Apple employee working covertly to cement ProRes as an open codec?
- Dylan16807 3y agoThough if you used a normal codec but only output I-frames at very high quality you'd end up pretty close.
- replygirl 3y agoby close you mean proxy files?
- Dylan16807 3y agoNo, by close I mean you'd hit the same use case and have similar attributes. Probably not as fast but it would scrub well.
- kiririn 3y agoWhy would only I-frames make a (positive) difference? Sure it makes decoding for seeking easier/faster but it should end up being lower quality at equivalent bitrate?
- crazygringo 3y agoBecause it's meant for editing, to be able to cut anywhere without re-encoding. So it needs to be all I-frames. And you're going to use a very high bitrate. This is way more space than consumer codecs use. But still way less than uncompressed video.
- kiririn 3y agoI’m struggling to imagine a use case for removing bits of a video and then saving that intermediate back out without editing or reencoding but if that’s what a video editing workflow calls for then fair play!
- dylan604 3y agoyou just described pretty much every single modern day video capture. pretty much all of the dslr/mirrorless cameras are capturing a higher bitrate h.264 as source.
- crazygringo 3y agoIt's my understanding that TV series are delivered to Netflix and other streamers in ProRes these days. Then they convert to h.264/265/etc. as desired to produce the consumer streams. I'm curious... does anyone know, do they use ffmpeg for that? Or a commercial tool?
- easylogin 3y agoFFMPEG and Elemental are the two which I've seen at scale. Source is not always the same, but does often go through a Mac. Not an Apple employee, but I've heard the reason they make the 5k display is to account for 4k fullscreen + toolbar.
- plastic3169 3y agoThey might have several possible formats but for example netflix branded content specs are in the net [1]. It’s IMF package with jpeg2000 content. Prores files are sent as helper files. Sometimes ffmpeg can be used but often grading / mastering tool is used for export (resolve, baselight etc). In my experience FFMPEG is very easy to keep consistent once you get the parameters right (which is always pretty painful), but pretty slow compared to most other tools. [1] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/7262346654995-Post-Production-Branded-Delivery-Specifications#h_01GBBMKWHNC66VQQ2SCK5D14TT https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/726...
- dylan604 3y ago"helper" files. is that the accepted term now instead of the master?
- plastic3169 3y agoI mean files that are called officially Servicing turnovers https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000385467-Content-Hub-Preparing-Pre-Release-Servicing-Turnovers https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
- lilnick 3y agoThe patch notes a significant speedup in performance on both Win64 and Win32 platforms, with approximately a 20% speedup on Win64 and a 14% speedup on Win32. Doesn't seem to be something which will improve performance on Linux based OSs?