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Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized soft

Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized software. Take a look at http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-and-Services/Video-Infrastructure/Encoders http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-and-S.... FFMPEG is great for personal use but unlikely to be used in production systems. 1. Its not "enterprisy". By that mean there is company behind the codecs who can provide support 24x7 on quality issues, robustness, warrenties etc.. 2. The ugly word - Patent covered. A lot of video technology has licensing and patenting. The moment sometime as big as Amazon tries to use a codec, the sharks will line up unless they have the right license.

zimbatm 14y ago
We're not talking about broadcasting but transcoding, which is a very different workload. FFmpeg is used by Youtube, Vimeo, ZenCoder, Transload-it and PandaStream (where I'm working at) to transform the videos. Hardware encoders are great for a specific target but FFmpeg just supports most the rubbish video formats that customers like to throw at us.
- blibble 14y ago
  given that sites tend to only encode to a few formats, and given decoding is cheap cpu wise: couldn't you pipe the output of the ffmpeg decoder into a hardware encoder and get the best of both worlds?
  - wmf 14y ago
    You mean the worst of both worlds? Hardware encoders are both more expensive and less elastic; software can just run on the existing EC2 infrastructure.
  - byoung2 14y ago
    When I worked at ClearChannel, it was the other way around...live feeds (e.g. Rush Limbaugh's HD video feed) came out of a bank of MOTU livestream encoders and was then fed through ffmpeg to be downsampled to web and mobile.
jfb 14y ago
Nobody uses ASIC hardware for off-line transcoding. There's no compelling reason, when you get much higher quality from software codecs.

zimbatm 14y ago

We're not talking about broadcasting but transcoding, which is a very different workload. FFmpeg is used by Youtube, Vimeo, ZenCoder, Transload-it and PandaStream (where I'm working at) to transform the videos. Hardware encoders are great for a specific target but FFmpeg just supports most the rubbish video formats that customers like to throw at us.

blibble 14y ago
given that sites tend to only encode to a few formats, and given decoding is cheap cpu wise: couldn't you pipe the output of the ffmpeg decoder into a hardware encoder and get the best of both worlds?
- wmf 14y ago
  You mean the worst of both worlds? Hardware encoders are both more expensive and less elastic; software can just run on the existing EC2 infrastructure.
- byoung2 14y ago
  When I worked at ClearChannel, it was the other way around...live feeds (e.g. Rush Limbaugh's HD video feed) came out of a bank of MOTU livestream encoders and was then fed through ffmpeg to be downsampled to web and mobile.

jfb 14y ago

Nobody uses ASIC hardware for off-line transcoding. There's no compelling reason, when you get much higher quality from software codecs.