3 ms·

Latency is still valuable. For example YouTube (which IIRC uses ffmpeg) often takes hours to do transcodes. This is likely somewhat due to scheduling but assumi

Latency is still valuable. For example YouTube (which IIRC uses ffmpeg) often takes hours to do transcodes. This is likely somewhat due to scheduling but assuming that they can get the same result doing 4x threads for 1/4 of the time they would prefer that as each job finishes faster. The only real question is at what efficiency cost the latency benefit stops being worth it.

lelanthran 3y ago
I think that if you're operating at the scale of Google using a single-threaded ffmpeg will finish your jobs in less time. If you have a queue of 100k videos to process and a cluster of 100 cores, assigning a video to each core as it becomes available is the most efficient way to process them, because your skipping the thread joining time. Anytime there is a queue of jobs, assigning the next job in the queue to the next free core is always going to be faster than assigning the next job to multiple cores.
Thaxll 3y ago
YouTube does not use ffmpeg, at the scale at which they operate it would be too slow / expensive. They use custom hardware just for encoding. fyi they have to transcode over 500h of videos per minute. So multiple that by all the formats they support. They operate at an insane scale, Netflix looks like a garage project for comparison.
- astrange 3y ago
  There's still decoding. If a service claims to support all kinds of weird formats (like a MOV or AVI from the 90s) that means ffmpeg is running.
  - canucker2016 3y ago
    Google's use of ffmpeg: https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ For encoding, recently, they've built their own ASIC to deal with H264 and VP9 encoding (for 7-33x faster encoding compared to CPU-only): 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...
- bagels 3y ago
  Facebook does, and contributes to ffmpeg.

lelanthran 3y ago

I think that if you're operating at the scale of Google using a single-threaded ffmpeg will finish your jobs in less time. If you have a queue of 100k videos to process and a cluster of 100 cores, assigning a video to each core as it becomes available is the most efficient way to process them, because your skipping the thread joining time. Anytime there is a queue of jobs, assigning the next job in the queue to the next free core is always going to be faster than assigning the next job to multiple cores.

Thaxll 3y ago

YouTube does not use ffmpeg, at the scale at which they operate it would be too slow / expensive. They use custom hardware just for encoding. fyi they have to transcode over 500h of videos per minute. So multiple that by all the formats they support. They operate at an insane scale, Netflix looks like a garage project for comparison.

astrange 3y ago
There's still decoding. If a service claims to support all kinds of weird formats (like a MOV or AVI from the 90s) that means ffmpeg is running.
- canucker2016 3y ago
  Google's use of ffmpeg: https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ For encoding, recently, they've built their own ASIC to deal with H264 and VP9 encoding (for 7-33x faster encoding compared to CPU-only): 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...
bagels 3y ago
Facebook does, and contributes to ffmpeg.