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I'm sure thought has been put into it. I just wonder why the OCAs aren't caches? I'd imagine a cache you be a lot more (mostly bandwidth) efficient for the ISPs
by ssmoot 12y ago
I'm sure thought has been put into it. I just wonder why the OCAs aren't caches? I'd imagine a cache you be a lot more (mostly bandwidth) efficient for the ISPs and scale much better.
I request a stream. It's proxied through the device. It's not present on the device. So the device requests the 1080P from Netflix. It transcodes the stream it receives on-the-fly and sends me whatever quality I require while writing both the original and my lower-quality version to disk.
I mean maybe the limitation in that plan is the number of streams that could be transcoded simultaneously. So maybe instead the on-the-fly version isn't cached. Because I may need to switch quality on-the-fly. So maybe instead jobs are just queued up for the 5 or so formats required based on the 1080P download and they can process on spare transcoders opportunistically.
Just interesting to think through it as a programming problem. I'm sure the people working on this are very smart. It just seems really heavy on the bandwidth utilization as is.
- mturmon 12y agoI can think of reasons why a pure cache would impose costs that are too high -- namely, the device would then be writing during times of very read load. But: I agree with your bigger point, that it's an interesting programming problem. We're all familiar with CPU caches, so it's interesting mental exercise to think of this as the same system, but optimized for a different part of design space.