Hacker News Reader

Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand the article.

If you want to encode video, use ffmpeg. Netflix serves static movies, so encoding is going to be relatively rare and can probably be done on whatever computing resources are already available. Quality-wise, the ffmpeg/x264/x265 people probably are doing a good job already.

If you want to serve video, serve it with HLS or similar from static files stored on a CDN with a bunch of bitrate profiles. Here the problem is more creating or finding the CDN that anything to do with video.

Can't quite figure out what the purpose of all the stuff in the article could be (maybe to justify the jobs of the people doing the work?)

View on HN

Disclaimer, not working for Netflix, but working in this area.

Ultimately it will still likely to be ffmpeg or their internal fork of it? But they are talking about per-title/per-shot optimisation here and not apply a blanket quality profile for every single video.

Netflix also produce their own series and allow them to optimise their encoding further.

They also have a Video Validation Services and Video Quality Services that do automatic quality check of the encoded video as the post indicated.

Is it complex, yes it is. But is it overly complex, maybe not?

Thats what they do, but better. Example they have their own CDN and put the nodes in your ISP facility.

Using per-title-encoding, allows you to have less renditions for a given video, having better cache hits.

Another example is pre-fetching data to the CDN nodes(when a new episode or season of a popular show comes out).

Its just extra optimizations that come up and are worth it at scale.

>Can't quite figure out what the purpose of all the stuff in the article could be

Netflix encoding is actually much more complex. Both per Scene and per TiTle encoding, optimal bitrate selection etc are a lot more than what ffmpeg offers if you do it manually.

Arguably you are right though Netflix could ignore all of that and just brute force the problem with much higher cost in terms of encoding, storage and bandwidth. But i guess at their scale it make sense to do all these optimisation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com