Video Transcoding

Who said old school media can’t innovate? NYTimes +1

Today, we are open sourcing the video-transcoding-api and the video encoding presets that we use to generate all of our outputs. We are also open sourcing the encoding-wrapper, which contains a set of Go clients for the services we support and that are used by the video-transcoding-api.

We believe the format we’ve created will be of particular interest to the open source community. By leveraging the abstractions found in the video-transcoding-api, any developer can write the code necessary to send jobs to any transcoding provider we support without having to rewrite the base preset or the job specification. Sending a job to a different provider is as simple as changing a parameter.

We currently support three popular transcoding providers and plan to add support for more. See a sample preset below, in JSON format:

Our future plans

In order to fulfill our vision of having a fully open sourced video encoding and distribution pipeline, we thought it best to also tackle the issue of actually encoding the video. We’re officially taking on the development and maintenance of the open source project Snickers to serve this purpose. We’ll not only gain the freedom of deploying our own encoding service anywhere, but we’ll also be able to experiment and implement new features that may not be available with existing service providers or and respond to specific requests from our newsroom. A few examples on the horizon are the automatic generation of thumbnails and accurate audio transcripts.

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