Community Forums

1. 

   mseibert
   Member
   Posted 8 years ago

   I have learned that MediaDrop sends videos for transcoding to http://pandastream.com/ which means, that this is a hybrid solution. Is there a possibility to run MediDrop 100% offline and do the transcoding there as well?
2. 

   Robert Buchholz
   Administrator
   Posted 8 years ago

   Hello Martin,

   by default MediaDrop does no encoding on its own, it expects you to upload web&streaming ready video files (one or more files) and then the player part (on the server) decides which of the URLs to use. As you point out, there's a plugin to encode through PandaStream (but I have not used that in production yet, and last time I checked it does not support the latest version of Panda APIs).
   There's nothing forcing you to transcode through PandaStream however and that plugin is not included by default. If you are looking to run transcoding yourself, there's no way around running your own transcoding infrastructure (ideally on dedicated machines and providing some sort of service API). It's not advisable to run this kind of job "in the background" on the MediaDrop web server.
   I looked into Codem transcoder before, but after a spike project discarded it as it has no support for adaptive multi-bitrate streams. So I ended up writing a custom transcoding server for a project.
   One thing to keep in mind when running your own transcoding infrastructure is that you may need to acquire patent licenses, depending on codecs you are using and content you are encoding.
3. 

   mseibert
   Member
   Posted 8 years ago

   Thanks for the reply. What does it mean, if I want to " upload web&streaming ready video files (one or more files)" myself and circumvent the transcoding process or do that on my machine?

   I know that this is probably a noob question. But it would be very helpful if you could help me out here.
4. 

   Robert Buchholz
   Administrator
   Posted 8 years ago

   You can upload basically any file. Whether a certain browser can decode that file depends on many factors (are you using the an Adobe Flash player, are using HTML5 video, thus relying on the operating system and browser). If you are only encoding one file, you'd probably want to make that MP4+h264+aac for maximum compatibility (and max. patent pain).

   For details, start with http://support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/articles/1403635-media-format-reference and http://support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/articles/1403653-browser-device-reference

   Robert
5. 

   mseibert
   Member
   Posted 8 years ago

   Thanks.
6. 

   cfarn
   Member
   Posted 8 years ago

   I have been using a handbrake bot for several months to auto-transcode most media that I upload to my server into h.264/aac in an mp4 container(it seems to not like .flv's). It just runs as a daemon on my mediadrop server and checks for new files within the video directory, converts them, and gives them the same name. I have not had any problems with the handbrake bot interfering with the performance of mediadrop, but I am also running a very small instance and I am the only one adding media(maybe like once a week.) I would agree with Robert that in an enterprise environment you would want to have a separate system to do the encoding. Link to handbrake bot: https://github.com/docdawning/mediadrop-handbrake-bot

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.