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The challenge of writing a on-demand transcoder


For Kyoo, I need to play video on a variety of clients (browsers, TVs, mobile apps). Clients does not always support the video codec of the source video since videos are user provided. Any valid video should work everywhere. Users should not have to worry about converting videos for Kyoo to work, everything should Work™ the first time. Users don’t always have a stable connection, but they should be able to play their video.

Receiving this request, the server will start a new transcode and give back the index file.Let’s pretend your client was playing the 150th segment at 5 min of your movie in 4k. awk: A pattern scanning and processing language (aka an underrated tool).-F',': Set the field separator to,./K/: Filter only lines that contain K. This is sed ’s syntax. While this was the right call if I wanted to quickly create a transcoder, learning to read the ffmpeg’s source code and how it worked inside gave me lots of insights.

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