How Facebook Encodes Videos
Facebook (via Hacker News):
But while more advanced codecs like VP9 provide better compression performance over older codecs, like H264, they also consume more computing power. From a pure computing perspective, applying the most advanced codecs to every video uploaded to Facebook would be prohibitively inefficient. Which means there needs to be a way to prioritize which videos need to be encoded using more advanced codecs.
Today, Facebook deals with its high demand for encoding high-quality video content by combining a benefit-cost model with a machine learning (ML) model that lets us prioritize advanced encoding for highly watched videos. By predicting which videos will be highly watched and encoding them first, we can reduce buffering, improve overall visual quality, and allow people on Facebook who may be limited by their data plans to watch more videos.
