2 years ago

Social media outlet Instagram diverted compute spend from its basic video encodings for more advanced encoding. A https://engineering.fb.com/2022/11/04/video-engineering/instagram-video-processing-encoding-reduction/ written by Instagram Staff Software Engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/ and Instagram Software Engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/haixiashi/ explains that by Instagram’s own projections back in early 2021, it had less than a year before running out of machine compute capacity to provide video uploads for all users.

The advanced encodings only covered 15% of the total with time and Instagram’s projections were that advanced encodings would soon be completely snuffed out when more resources were required for minimum functionality encodings.

Compute was freed up for advanced encoding production but at the expense of compression efficiency of the basic ABR encodings.

And more advanced video encodings would more than make up for the lower quality of the minimum functionality encodings.