Bitcodin (YC S15) encodes video 100x faster, in Netflix-grade quality | Hacker News Reader

Bitcodin (YC S15) encodes video 100x faster, in Netflix-grade quality

venturebeat.com

11 pointsslederer12 comments

It sounds great and all, but what is your Weissman score?

As far as I know the weissman score is for lossless compression and our compression is lossy. But we could compare it to, e.g., x264 running on a single server and calculate a weissman score, but more or less it is then just a speed comparison ;) and in that case we are way faster/better.

And can they handle 3D video files? Everyone knows 3D is the future!

Hi, I'm Stefan, one of the co-founders. I'm happy to answer questions and get feedback!

Hey Stefan!

I've actually planned to use your services soon for a video app i'm developing.

But am I imagining or did your free plan was drastically nerfed lately? I remember it being 6GB and no encodings/GB limit two weeks ago. Why the change?

With 10 encodings per month I don't think I can even test my app.

With the new free plan you have now every month new free GB which you can use, rather than the one-time credits of the old one. We also introduced our plans recently, which do not have a limit on the number of encoding and a cheaper per GB price. Drop me a line to sl@bitmovin.com and I'll get you the proper setting for your app's needs :-)

Ah right. Forgot about the one-time credit. Will contact you soon!

Could you provide some details on how you are encoding videos 100x faster?

Sure, basically other encode video second by second, we can do this in parallel on salable cloud infrastructure.

We also released a blog-post on this, based on a writeup from our infrastructure partner Google Compute Engine here: https://www.bitcodin.com/blog/2015/08/how-bitcodin-utilizes-...

Hi Stefan,

Glad to see someone doing this. I am assuming the process goes like this:

1. Segment the video first - upload them to cloud.

2. Let Map-Reduce do the transcoding on the individual segments.

3. Fetch the segments back at a place.

4. Create the manifest file listing the individual segment.

Is that roughly correct?

Since you are doing this on GCE, I am assuming you are not using GPUs, only CPUs, right?

Transcoding aside, how are you serving the video, where do you store it and which CDN do you use?

yes, it's more or less how you described it, we just added some tweaks here and there to make it work in practice :-)

ad 1.) no, we first grab the video from the user and then segment it in the cloud

Yes, we just run CPU instances.

Typically the user transfers the file back, e.g. via our FTP-transfer, S3, GCS, or simple download as zip.

Thanks for the reply. I tried it.

Just the resource allocation took 2 min and the transcoding was done in 15 seconds for a 4 min video, so looks good.

Regarding selling this thing, I don't know if there could be any good use case for normal people. New enterprises could be better target. Old enterprises too can benefit if their current price is more than what you are providing.

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