Comment by catapart
7 hours ago
Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope you don't mind me asking:
Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.
Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?
> Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware?
I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p, and depending on server config often several more times. Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial hwaccel on a desktop.
Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often 4k60.
> Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.
If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience. Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb. I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.
I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I wonder if it might be suited for something like https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights, and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?