<story><title>How Facebook encodes videos</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/05/video-engineering/how-facebook-encodes-your-videos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised Facebook still uses software to do video encoding.&lt;p&gt;Most big companies with millions of hours of video uploaded each day have realised it&amp;#x27;s cheaper to stick a bunch of hardware video encoding chips onto an accelerator board and be able to transcode 100 HD streams simultaneously into all the formats and resolutions you need to host.&lt;p&gt;The power savings on CPU&amp;#x27;s pay for the custom hardware in a matter of months.&lt;p&gt;It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>Google released the paper [1] &amp;quot;Warehouse-scale video acceleration: co-design and deployment in the wild &amp;quot; a few days ago.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26925307&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26925307&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.&lt;p&gt;A new video codec is released and adopted once every ten years. So I dont think it would be a problem. Hardware encoding also trade compression quality for speed. And they are compensating it with slightly higher bitrate.  It will also reduce their incentives for improving open source encoder.&lt;p&gt;Although I think even Netflix switched to BEAMR ( Cant really blame them though )&lt;p&gt;I think the next frontier, for both Audio and Video will be Codec designed with LiveStreaming &amp;#x2F; Low Latency in mind.&lt;p&gt;( Or pretty much everything computing, I wish we could focus on latency, from Hardware Input, Display, Network, Disk, etc.  Apple is certainly moving in that direction without talking about it. )</text></comment>
<story><title>How Facebook encodes videos</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/05/video-engineering/how-facebook-encodes-your-videos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised Facebook still uses software to do video encoding.&lt;p&gt;Most big companies with millions of hours of video uploaded each day have realised it&amp;#x27;s cheaper to stick a bunch of hardware video encoding chips onto an accelerator board and be able to transcode 100 HD streams simultaneously into all the formats and resolutions you need to host.&lt;p&gt;The power savings on CPU&amp;#x27;s pay for the custom hardware in a matter of months.&lt;p&gt;It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astrange</author><text>Hardware encoders are not as good because they have worse algorithms in order to make them faster. I don’t think you could make an x265 ASIC.&lt;p&gt;Also, good video codec engineers can’t be hired for any predictable amount of money, and ones who speak Verilog barely exist.</text></comment>