SVT Encore – Abstract the Transcoding Power of FFmpeg | Hacker News Reader

SVT Encore – Abstract the Transcoding Power of FFmpeg

github.com

55 pointsunicornporn31 comments

Since it's probably not clear to most HN readers, this is maintained by the Swedish public broadcaster (SVT: Sveriges Television) which provides a video streaming service (similar to BBC iPlayer) at https://www.svtplay.se

The documentation has a story about how the project came about (as a replacement for the proprietary system they were using) https://svt.github.io/encore-doc/#projecthistory

I was assuming it was part of Intel's SVT encoder project

https://01.org/svt

Speaking of that, today is the last day to see the 24/7 "slow TV" streaming of the moose crossing the stream [1].

https://www.svtplay.se/video/30837126/den-stora-algvandringe...

Not sure if it’s georestricted or not, but if it is that’s probably easily solvable with Mullvad VPN or a similar service.

It's not for the US, Denmark and Swtizerland at least.

Verified access from US although I think they ran out of moose.

Most of the time, you only see them (or other animals) rarely, but sometimes there are a bunch non-stop. That's how it is.

Great. I guess they mostly do that for stuff they don’t own themselves.

I think so actually, stuff they're getting a license from someone else for.

It's also on twitch, shouldn't be geoblocked there https://www.twitch.tv/svt_slow

As a Swede I was not expecting the (for us familiar) SVT abbreviation to show up here. I definitely expected that it was some other org with the same name! Nice surprise.

More details here https://medium.com/the-svt-tech-blog/encore-open-source-lice...

Literally my tax money at work :-p

I guess you mean your radio license money? SVT is not funded by taxes.

It for sure is, you can see it on your tax declaration.

A quick search would have led you to the Wikipedia page, where the first paragraph is the following

> [SVT] is the Swedish national public television broadcaster, funded by a public service tax on personal income set by the Riksdag (national parliament) https://www.regeringen.se/regeringens-politik/medier/ny-avgi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sveriges_Television

My bad, did not know it had changed

It used to be funded by a license but the parliament had a vote in 2018 which changed that, so it’s now funded by taxes.

*license. Not tax. A distinction that is subtle but still important.

It used to be a license but then they switched to taking the money directly from every tax paying adult, thus increasing their budget with a couple of billion SEK.

Was this because license revenue dropped? They want to do the same in Ireland

In the long run it would've. It was mandatory to pay if you owned a TV. They tried to collect it for people having laptops / mobile phones but it was ruled illegal in the courts.

Instead the government replaced it with a new tax which seems more fair.

I would say so, yes. As another commentator said they tried to get more people to pay but failed and then instead used corrupt politicians to do their bidding.

I didn't use to pay, now I have no choice.

It’s still a license or “fee”, not a tax. What changed is who they charge it from and how it’s collected (now through the same method as taxes).

The license being charged from every taxpayer and collected using tax collection mechanisms doesn’t make it a tax.

The difference is that a tax would be collected into the budget and SVT would be funded through the budget.

A license on the other hand is paid directly to the public service companies which (in theory) gives some amount of political independence.

So: license, not tax.

It might look to some like a useless distinction “how is money paid on my tax bill not a tax!?”, but there is an important difference.

But its funded by the tax, ergo it literally is their tax money at work here.

But I just explained how the fee being on the tax bill does not make it a tax, since the definition would be “part of the tax budget” not “money collected the same way as taxes”.

Which part of what I’m saying are you disagreeing with, and why?

The distinction matters in some aspects – e.g. other government agencies can most probably not take the money collected for SVT/SR/UR and use it for other means.

However, a compulsory fee that is forced upon every adult that has an income, even if that person doesn’t own a TV and never utilize the services of SVT/SR/UR, then add to this that the fee is collected by the Swedish Tax Agency – to me that surely meets the definition of a tax.

I reject the universality of your definition. How the government spend the collected revenue can't (and isn't) the singular requirement on deciding wether something is a tax or a fee in many circumstances.

For example OECD has definitions they use when comparing tax revenue between countries, loosely explained here [0]. OECD count the public service fee as a fee, but I'm guessing that other things that your definition might categorise as fees are counted as taxes (e.g parts of the compulsory contribution to socialised welfare systems that the employer pays).

To further complicate things, the Swedish government via the ESV seem to categorise the public service fee as a tax [1]. EDIT: This probably describe the reasoning [2]

(But I don't think anyone would argue that e.g the church fee is a tax, since it's voluntary and the government have no ability to spend it at all, even though it's collected via the taxing system).

[0]: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/oecd-classification-taxe... (p. 320) [1]: https://www.esv.se/contentassets/9d641ba02ce246189306a1c50a2... (p. 91). [2]: https://scb.se/contentassets/237f5d71840c4b6b84b147514dba4d3...

Seems like it is essentially a job queue for video transcoding?

Yeah some examples of what you can do with it would help

That's what it looks like. Scalable, though. Might be good for burst-like processing.

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