tomwilderspin / cloudtranscode

Cloud Transcode - Distributed transcoding stack using Amazon AWS and FFMpeg

Note

I am focusing on another technical part of my company. I can't work on CloudTranscode at the moment. If you have time and want to pick up where I left off, get in touch with me! I will gladly guide you through it.

TODO

• Improve Thumbnails generation
• Transcode images, audio, documents
• Perform video split/transcode/merge

What is Cloud Transcode ?

Cloud Transcode is a custom distributed transcoding stack using Amazon AWS services.

The goal of this project is to create an open source, scalable and cheap distributed transcoding platform where users have complete control over performance and cost.

We start with video transcoding which is the most costly, but the goal is to transcode any media (audio, documents and images). We use FFMpeg for video transcoding.

Today's commercial solutions for video transcoding are very expensive for large volumes. With this solution you can transcode large quantity of videos at the pace you want, thus controling your cost.

With Cloud Transcode, you control: scale, speed and cost. You can run everything locally if you want, no Cloud instance required. You only need an Amazon AWS account and an Internet connection to use the required Amazon services: SWF, SQS and S3.

It means that you can have a local, hybrid or full cloud setup on Amazon Ec2 instances, it's up to you.

Transcoding supported

• Video to Video transcoding: One video IN, many videos OUT. Any formats and codecs supported by your ffmpeg.
• Video to Thumbnails transcoding: Snapshot at certain time in video or intervals snapshot every N seconds.
• Watermark integration in video: Take image IN and position a watermark on top of the video. Custom position and transparency.

High Level Architecture

Quick start with Vagrant

A Vagrant box (Virtual Machine) which provides pre-configured environment to run the stack has been created to help you test the stack and work on it. You can use Vagrant on any OS and quickly bootstrap.

See: https://sportarchive.hackpad.com/Cloud-Transcode-project-poG8vKTC16J#:h=Quick-start-with-Vagrant

More info

Find the detailed documentation here: https://sportarchive.hackpad.com/Cloud-Transcode-project-poG8vKTC16J

FFMpeg performance benchmark on Amazon EC2

Download the spreadsheet to compare the different Amazon EC2 instances cost and performances: https://github.com/sportarchive/CloudTranscode/blob/master/benchmark/benchmark-aws-ffmpeg.xlsx