

How bitcodin uses Google Compute Engine to encode video 100x faster than others - slederer
https://www.bitcodin.com/blog/2015/08/how-bitcodin-utilizes-google-compute-engine/

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dr_zoidberg
I got the feeling that they were about to explain the details when they
decided the article was long enough and that was it... They say their coding
approach is not tied to GCE, but in the end GCE's infrastructure is great!

Does anyone have some interesting details or a good read on distributed
encoding? I imagine that since they have a segmented input, they can
paralellize extremely well, encode every segment independently and in the end
stitch everything together (or maybe not, and keep them separate to simplify
streaming?).

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slederer
Thanks, good point!

Yes, the approach in general is not limited to GCE, but some characteristics
of GCE - like the fast provisioning time as well as the good interconnection
between instances - are very beneficial for that approach. That's the reason
why it works so fast on GCE. Does this makes sense to you?

Our input files are not segmented, you can use the commonly used media formats
out in the market as MP4, MKV, etc. and we take care of the rest.

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dr_zoidberg
Well most video containers formats allow for some sort of segmenting that's
also beneficial for streaming applications. My guess was that segmenting the
video on the "natural chunks" of the format allowed for easier
paralellization.

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slederer
that's completely true, containers like ISO Base Media FF(MP4) or Matroska
support streaming use cases, which is even more beneficial if we got those
files as input. But we can also work with any others ... which was also pretty
much work :-)

