[HN Gopher] How Facebook encodes videos ___________________________________________________________________ How Facebook encodes videos Author : nl Score : 62 points Date : 2021-04-25 06:22 UTC (16 hours ago) (HTM) web link (engineering.fb.com) (TXT) w3m dump (engineering.fb.com) | mappu wrote: | _> An encoding family requires a minimum set of resolutions to be | made available before we can deliver a video. [...] For example, | having one video with all of its VP9 lanes adds more value than | 10 videos with incomplete (and therefore, undeliverable) VP9 | lanes._ | | I don't see why this constraint is in place, you can absolutely | serve video for certain-res users only with certain codecs | (youtube certainly does this). | vbsteven wrote: | I assume Facebook has this requirement for usability reasons. | They don't want a user to receive a video through one of its | many share features and then not be able to view it. | stefan_ wrote: | Maybe the people at Twitter can read this and learn something. | calebio wrote: | They still haven't figured out how to give users control of | their poor image cropping :( | zeeshanqureshi wrote: | Their "race-based" image cropping? | | https://youtu.be/Ok5sKLXqynQ?t=103 | wongarsu wrote: | That looks like cropping on whatever has the highest | confidence value of being a face. Evidently not a good | idea, it does look pretty racist. | blowski wrote: | These are the kinds of articles that show why Facebook has | different problems to almost every other tech company. The | complexity of these kinds of solutions is mind-boggling. | | Just imagine if all that ingenuity was focused on solving | humanity's problems, instead of sharing conspiracy theories and | advertising. | bob33212 wrote: | I wish people spent more time on Facebook. Is that what FB | employees think? Or are they like the rest of us and think fuck | this guy, but I'll take his money. | Const-me wrote: | At least here, the video quality is not good on FB. I have 120 | mbit/sec connection, youtube plays good quality 4k just fine. I | don't think I ever saw 1080p served by facebook, both resolution | and bitrate are very low. | ericbarrett wrote: | Your ISP might be throttling Facebook video | gjs278 wrote: | doubt it. facebook videos just absolutely suck in quality. | gruez wrote: | There's other explanations as well: | | * ISP has poor peering to facebook servers | | * ISP has cache/CDN node installed, but that's overloaded | | * the content that OP viewed isn't popular so it has to be | pulled from origin, which adds another layer of complications | londons_explore wrote: | I'm surprised Facebook still uses software to do video encoding. | | Most big companies with millions of hours of video uploaded each | day have realised it'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. | | The power savings on CPU's pay for the custom hardware in a | matter of months. | | It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released | though. | meteorfox wrote: | Facebook does have hardware for video transcoding. [1] | https://youtu.be/0yk4SPRisPA | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-25 23:00 UTC)