
Scanner: Processing Terabytes of Video on Hundreds of Machines - apoms
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~apoms/blog/scanner/2018/05/21/scanner.html
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crsv
I feel like CMU has been on a tear on HN lately. It feels like there's an
incredible amount of momentum around them, from Robotics to Computer Vision to
AI/ML. It feels like each thing that comes out lately is even more impressive
than the last. Exciting times. Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with CMU
whatsoever, just an admirer.

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kingbirdy
CMU does a ton of neat stuff, but that shouldn't be surprising, they're one of
the top CS research universities in the world.

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soziawa
So is ETH but they don't get so much exposure. What is the difference?

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speps
HN is primarily US oriented.

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jacquesm
HN is primarily Silicon Valley oriented. Pittsburgh is already quite far from
the center of gravity.

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aub3bhat
Scanner is a great tool I have been following it's development very closely
over the last year. Great to see it reach 1.0 . I highly recommend checking
out Hwang [1] (a sparse video decoder) which is bundled and used in Scanner.

Scanner is one of the first few tools to leverage Docker/Kubernetes by
demonstrating ability to ship complex heterogenous architecture in a
reliable/reproducible manner.

[1] [https://github.com/scanner-research/hwang](https://github.com/scanner-
research/hwang)

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yxchng
I am not an expert in video encoding. Just curious, what does Hwang offer that
ffmpeg doesn't?

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aub3bhat
Hwang lets you perform "efficient random access" across the video by building
a GOP/Segment aware index. This comes in handy in a lot of applications where
you want to access particular frame or set of frames but do not wish to decode
and store all frames. Most tools such as ffmpeg (command line application not
library) are optimized for sequential decode use case.

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indescions_2018
Oculus Research just rebranded itself as FB Reality Lab. And the Oculus Go
stand-alone headset looks like a winner with 100K sales already, 2M+ estimated
by years end.

Distributing VR / AR content seems the next big challenge to me. VRChat can
handle on order of 10 per room. But we are talking serious grid compute /
bandwidth beyond that. Especially for "multiplayer" narrative 360 video ;)

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jremmons
Can't wait until I can `apt-get` install this tool! (I'm not a huge fan of
using docker)

