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Transcoding

This makes absolutely no sense

4 replies [Last post]
Posted: Mon, 2010-01-18 23:17 Steve Simitzis
Anonymous's picture

Most of my videos are transcoding correctly, but a few of them are failing. I want to convert my originals into FLVs, but a small percentage of the FLVs are coming back with the error "larger than original", and thus do not convert.

Which is very problematic. I have set my account to remove originals, because I only need to process them once and I back them up elsewhere. However, if your system randomly does not process video, then I do not have consistently have high quality video to stream.

And also, I want those videos to be FLV no matter what. That's why I sent them for transcoding! What if your system refuses to transcode a MOV? Then even if I disabled "delete originals", I will have a video that is unplayable.

This behavior makes zero sense. Now I have a random number of videos that have silently failed. The originals are gone, and even though I have them saved off elsewhere, I'll have to handpick through hundreds of videos and reprocess them by hand before reuploading them into your system.

Your transcoding is trying to be Too Smart, and the result is not useful. I'm not looking forward to how many hours I'm going to have spend cleaning this up, and I doubt my client will be very happy either.

Can something be done to fix or improve this behavior?

Thank you.

Posted: Tue, 2010-01-19 07:02 JeroenW  
JeroenW's picture

I see the issue here. Our transcoder indeed does not apply templates if the width of the template is bigger than the width of the original (e.g. your original video is 320px wide and the template is 400px). This is a sane thing by itself, since transcoding upscaled content will not result in useful conversion. We didn't have this logic a year ago, by which time tons of people uploaded low quality videos and converted them to HD.

In your case however, it would be nice to keep things hands off. Do you know the widths of the various originals you upload?

  • If they are all in the 400 - 500px range, setting the FLV template to 400px wide will make sure all videos are transcoded.
  • If the widths vary wildly (400 - 1200px), it might be best to setup two templates: one very low (e.g. 320px) and one with a higher quality (e.g. 640px). Then the lower quality FLV is always there.
Posted: Tue, 2010-01-19 14:07 Steve Simitzis  
Steve Simitzis's picture

The widths do indeed vary wildly, as this is user generated content. However, the solution of creating extra templates means (a) paying to manage and store video we don't actually need in most cases and (b) guessing that my source video will not be under 320px (or whatever value), which may not even be a correct assumption. If a user submits an extremely low resolution clip, we still want to convert and display it, even at the inflated size, even though it will look wrong. This is a business requirement for my client.

The bottom line is that the resulting video should always be FLV, 512px wide, no matter what the source. I have no problem with upscaled content, all I want are results that are predictable and consistent.

Perhaps there can be an option to disable this logic, either account-wide or per video (on /video/create)?

Posted: Wed, 2010-01-20 09:02 JeroenW  
JeroenW's picture

There is a lower threshold, below which conversions are automatically created. I believe this is 320px wide at present. This means that the default 320px wide MP4 is always created, even if the source file is < 320px wide.

Perhaps we can add this ignore original width as an option to the transcoding templates. The setting makes sense. The options then would be:

  • Only transcode if originals are wider than this template.
  • Always transcode, regerdless the width of the original.
Posted: Thu, 2010-01-21 05:19 JeroenW  
JeroenW's picture

Confirmed this with Daniel (our transcoding guru). Having this option in the transcoding templates makes sense, so we will add it.

It will take a few weeks before it's implemented though; right now we are workign on pushing the reselling release out the door.

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