Building cloud-ready video transcoding system for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Video streaming traffic of both VoD (Video on Demand) and Live is exploding. Various types of businesses and many people are relying on video streaming to attract customers/users and for other purposes. Given the vast number of video stream formats (e.g., MP4, FLV) and transmission protocols (e.g., HTTP, RTMP, RTSP) for supporting varying types of playback terminals (particularly mobile devices such as iphone/ipad and Android phones), video content providers often need to transcode videos to multiple formats in order to stream to different types of users. Being time-sensitive and requiring high bandwidth, video streaming exerts high pressure on underlying delivery networks. Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers can help their customers quickly and reliably distribute stream contents to end users. In addition to distributing video streams, CDN providers typically allow their customers to perform video transcoding on CDN platforms. With the high volume of video streams and the bursty transcoding workload, CDN providers are eager to deploy elastic and optimized cloud-based transcoding platforms. In this paper, we design and build such a transcoding platform.