Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram | Hacker News Reader

Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram

instagram-engineering.com

47 pointsYoavShapira16 comments

How do Medium get away with articles looking like this? This is what the page looks like for me after loading: https://i.ibb.co/9rQMXLF/Screenshot-20190614-183927.png

Since your in android, install Firefox and then ublock origin then go into ublock settings and check the 'annoyances list' and you'll have a much nicer experience.

Firefox for Android has got ridiculously better over the last 18mths and is a usable replacement for Chrome for my needs.

Here's a version with all the Medium-junk stripped away:

https://outline.com/UvNpVy

Under "Segmented Video Upload Processing" they explain how cutting up the video before upload makes it easier to process. Does anyone know how they're maintaining audio sync? Every single time I've tried to cut up (mp4/m2ts) video to re-encode it in parallel, I've had it go completely out of sync.

It seems a bit overkill to spin up a new worker per segment, especially if encountering I/O bottlenecks. Why not make sure to distribute multiple segments to multiple threads on the same (large-enough) worker so it can stitch them all together from the same machine?

Why not show the video as "uploaded" to the user posting the video (and playback from a local copy), and then publish in the background to other users? Latency of 0 :)

Because that doesn't reduce latency, but instead just makes it look like that which is worse.

If the user then copies the URL of their post and sends it to another user the other user will not be able to view it.

It would also not be noticeable for the user if an error occurs while processing the video.

That's a good point, thanks very much.

Also: if they switch to another app, platforms like iOS will pause/suspend (within a few seconds) the upload before it likely completes.

In the meantime, I'm still waiting for the option to disable video autoplay. But they wont, because they want to push the narrative that so many users view video-based ads. You know what, we don't view them, we scroll past them. If you really wanted to be honest with advertisers, you would disable autoplay, and then we could really see how many users really click the play button.

I don't disagree with this, but honestly I just wish they'd give me a way to restart a video that had autoplayed. I have to tap to start audio, so if I get to a video a couple of seconds after it has started playing and want to listen to it, I have to wait until it loops around to get to the start.

You can just scroll up and down and it should restart once it get's into focus again.

Medium has a paywall on this page. Here's a cache.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190614024004/https://instagram...

It's pretty sad that they're announcing blog news on medium at all instead of their parent companies multi billion dollar network

To be fair, their parent company's network is if anything more hostile to users who aren't logged in.

Faster, readable version:

https://outline.com/UvNpVy

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