These slides were presented at the Streaming Media West conference in 2016. This talk is also a reference to the blog post "Using Microservices to Encode and Publish Videos at The New York Times" at The New York Times Open blog. - Streaming Media West 2016: http://streamingmedia.com/Conferences/West2016/ - Open Blog: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/using-microservices-to-encode-and-publish-videos-at-the-new-york-times/

1. Building a Video
Encoding Pipeline at
The New York Times
Streaming Media West, 2016

2. Maxwell Dayvson Da Silva
Sr. Director of Engineering
http://github.com/dayvson
http://twitter.com/dayvson
http://dayvson.me

3. Flávio Ribeiro
Sr. Software Engineer
http://github.com/flavioribeiro
http://twitter.com/flavioribeiro
http://flavioribeiro.com

4. First, a little bit of history

5. The Architecture of the old system
Video CMS
(StoryLog)
NYTimes CMS
(Scoop)
Internal
Encoding Cluster
Internal Storage
CDN

6. The flaws

7. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders
3. Unstable transcoding
4. Hard to scale
5. Two CMSs are required to publish a video.

8. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders (hard to maintain)
3.
4. Unstable transcoding (proprietary software)
5. Hard to scale (cluster in-house)
43380_1_saudi-documentary_wg_720p.mp4

9. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders (hard to maintain)
3. Unstable transcoding (proprietary software)
4. Hard to scale (cluster in-house)
43380_1_saudi-documentary_wg_720p.mp4
Production ID

10. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders (hard to maintain)
3. Unstable transcoding (proprietary software)
4. Hard to scale (cluster in-house)
5.
43380_1_saudi-documentary_wg_720p.mp4
Version

11. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders (hard to maintain)
3. Unstable transcoding (proprietary software)
4. Hard to scale (cluster in-house)
43380_1_saudi-documentary_wg_720p.mp4
Slug

12. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders (hard to maintain)
3. Unstable transcoding (proprietary software)
4.
5. Hard to scale (cluster in-house)
43380_1_saudi-documentary_wg_720p.mp4
Resolution

13. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders
3. Unstable transcoding
4. Hard to scale
5. Two CMS to publish a video

14. The Flaws
1. Filenames
2. Several watch folders
3. U
4. Hard to scale (cluster in-house)

15. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders
3. Unstable transcoding
4. Hard to scale
5. Two CMS to publish a video

16. The Flaws

17. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders
3. Unstable transcoding
4. Hard to scale
5. Two CMS to publish a video

18. Number of videos
published per year.

19. The Flaws
1. The whole process relies on a filename
2. Several watch folders
3. Unstable transcoding
4. Hard to scale
5. Two CMSs to publish a video

20. The challenges

21. The Challenges
1. Fast encoding. News Clips are very time sensitive
2. Scalability
3. Reliability
4. Company-wide video transcoding solution
5. High-quality transcoding
○ 360°, Drone footage, Live Action

22. The solution

24. The Video Pipeline
Distribution API
Acquisition API
Transcoding API
Storage
Media Factory Client
Media Factory API
CDN
Database

25. Media Factory Client
Distribution API
Acquisition API
Transcoding API
Storage
Media Factory Client
Media Factory API
Database
CDN

26. Media Factory Client
1. EcmaScript 6 Library
2. Upload Files from Browser to S3
○ http://github.com/TTLabs/EvaporateJS
3. Trigger Jobs on Media Factory API
4. Used by other teams

27. Acquisition API
Distribution API
Acquisition API
Transcoding API
Storage
Media Factory Client
Database
Media Factory API
CDN

28. Acquisition API
1. Back-end integration to upload files
○ External partners
2. Plan to support resumable uploads

29. Database
Media Factory Client
Storage
Media Factory API
Distribution API
CDN
Acquisition API
Transcoding APIMedia Factory API

30. Media Factory API
1. All NYTimes business logics
○ Interact with our internal APIs
○ Define which presets will be used based
on job type (Standard, 360)
○ http://github.com/nytimes/video-presets

31. Transcoding API
Distribution API
Acquisition API
Transcoding API
Storage
Media Factory Client
Media Factory API
CDN
Database

32. Transcoding API
1. Integration with multiple encoding cloud
services
2. Reliability & Scalability
3. Define a common Job specification
4. Define a common Preset specification

33. Transcoding API - Job Example
{
"provider": "elastictranscoder",
"source": "s3://somebucket/folder/my_video.mov",
"streamingParams": {
"playlistFileName": "hls/playlist.m3u8",
"segmentDuration": 5,
"protocol": "hls"
}
"outputs": [
{"preset": "720p_mp4", "fileName": "my_video_720p.mp4"},
{"preset": "1080p_mp4", "fileName": "my_video_1080p.mp4"},
{"preset": "256p_hls", "fileName": "hls/my_video_480p.m3u8"},
{"preset": "480p_hls", "fileName": "hls/my_video_480p.m3u8"},
{"preset": "720p_hls", "fileName": "hls/my_video_720p.m3u8"},
{"preset": "1080p_hls", "fileName": "hls/my_video_1080p.m3u8"},
{"preset": "2160p_hls", "fileName": "hls/my_video_2160p.m3u8"}
]
}

34. Transcoding API - Preset Example
"providers": ["elastictranscoder", "elementalconductor", "encodingcom", "zencoder"],
"preset": {
"name": "sample_preset",
"description": "This is an example preset",
"container": "mp4",
"profile": "Main", "profileLevel": "3.1",
"rateControl": "VBR",
"video": {
"height": "720", "width": "1080",
"codec": "h264", "bitrate": "1000000",
"gopSize": "90", "gopMode": "fixed",
"interlaceMode": "progressive"
},
"audio": {
"codec": "aac",
"bitrate": "64000"
}

35. Transcoding API
1. Integration with multiple encoding cloud
services
2. Reliability & Scalability
3. Define a common Job specification
4. Define a common Preset specification
5. http://nyti.ms/mediafactory

36. The Distribution API
Database
Media Factory API Distribution API
Acquisition API
Media Factory Client
Transcoding API
Storage
CDN

37. Distribution API
1. Fast file transfer leveraging Aspera protocol
2. Plan to support distribution to our partners
○ Youtube, Facebook, other partners
3. Plan to support to multiple CDNs

38. Just a recap!
Distribution API
Acquisition API
Transcoding API
Storage
Media Factory Client
Media Factory API
CDN
Database

39. Future
1. Video Quality
○ Classify into groups
○ VMAF, Reingest on the Media Factory API
2. Open Source
○ Distribution API
○ Acquisition API
3. Snickers (http://github.com/snickers/snickers)

40. We’re hiring
nyti.ms/technology
@NYTDevs | developers.nytimes.com

41. Stay updated
open.blogs.nytimes.com
@NYTDevs | developers.nytimes.com

42. Connect with us on Slack!
http://video-dev.org
@NYTDevs | developers.nytimes.com

43. Thank you!
{ , } /flavioribeiro
{ , } /dayvson