Hacker News Reader

Comment by cantbecool | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Twitch use elemental machines for transcoding?

No. Elemental is more of a high end encoding system for quality. Twitch is more about bulk cheap transcodes of good quality. Think about it. MLB has maybe 18 concurrent events. Twitch is running minimum in the 10k range.

No we never had Elementals. In the early days there was no way we could afford them. In the later days I don't think we would want them as we needed to scale so many transcode jobs that it was easier to have a large farm of dumb machines to organise jobs across.

There may have been an element machine at one point that was used for testing/playing but I really don't think so, and know there wasn't one between 2010 and 2017.

Transcoding was a relatively late addition to the whole system— for a long time we only passed through the original video bits unchanged and tried to advise broadcasters about picking compromise settings.

By the time we decided transcoding was necessary, we had enough in-house video engineering knowledge to build our own system integrated with everything else.

We had transcoding as early as 2011. As that is when I made my first commits to the video jobs codebase, specifically to the transcoding jobs. It was quite late when we had the resources ($$$) to provide widespread availability of transcodes to the community.

Yeah; my perspective on “late” is probably pretty skewed, since I left as the rebranding was still being developed. I think the favorite new name when I left was something like Xarth; Twitch was a much better choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com