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

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

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

First, a little bit of history 

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

The flaws 

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. 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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

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 

The Flaws 

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 

Number of videos published per year. 

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 

The challenges 

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 

The solution 

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

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

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 

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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"} ] } 

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" } 

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 

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

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 

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

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) 

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

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

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

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