Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram

https://instagram-engineering.com/video-upload-latency-improvements-at-instagram-bcf4b4c5520a

by YoavShapira • 7 years ago

47 16 7 years ago

instagram-engineering.com

mychael• 7 years ago

Medium has a paywall on this page. Here's a cache.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190614024004/https://instagram...

drcross• 7 years ago

It's pretty sad that they're announcing blog news on medium at all instead of their parent companies multi billion dollar network

DoctorOW• 7 years ago

To be fair, their parent company's network is if anything more hostile to users who aren't logged in.

nacs2• 7 years ago

Faster, readable version:

https://outline.com/UvNpVy

voltagex_• 7 years ago

Under "Segmented Video Upload Processing" they explain how cutting up the video before upload makes it easier to process. Does anyone know how they're maintaining audio sync? Every single time I've tried to cut up (mp4/m2ts) video to re-encode it in parallel, I've had it go completely out of sync.

jakecopp2• 7 years ago

Why not show the video as "uploaded" to the user posting the video (and playback from a local copy), and then publish in the background to other users? Latency of 0 :)

a254613e• 7 years ago

Because that doesn't reduce latency, but instead just makes it look like that which is worse.

If the user then copies the URL of their post and sends it to another user the other user will not be able to view it.

It would also not be noticeable for the user if an error occurs while processing the video.

jakecopp2• 7 years ago

That's a good point, thanks very much.

elithrar• 7 years ago

Also: if they switch to another app, platforms like iOS will pause/suspend (within a few seconds) the upload before it likely completes.

dvfjsdhgfv• 7 years ago

In the meantime, I'm still waiting for the option to disable video autoplay. But they wont, because they want to push the narrative that so many users view video-based ads. You know what, we don't view them, we scroll past them. If you really wanted to be honest with advertisers, you would disable autoplay, and then we could really see how many users really click the play button.

mitheren• 7 years ago

I don't disagree with this, but honestly I just wish they'd give me a way to restart a video that had autoplayed. I have to tap to start audio, so if I get to a video a couple of seconds after it has started playing and want to listen to it, I have to wait until it loops around to get to the start.

rumori• 7 years ago

You can just scroll up and down and it should restart once it get's into focus again.

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj• 7 years ago

How do Medium get away with articles looking like this? This is what the page looks like for me after loading: https://i.ibb.co/9rQMXLF/Screenshot-20190614-183927.png

noir_lord• 7 years ago

Since your in android, install Firefox and then ublock origin then go into ublock settings and check the 'annoyances list' and you'll have a much nicer experience.

Firefox for Android has got ridiculously better over the last 18mths and is a usable replacement for Chrome for my needs.

nacs2• 7 years ago

Here's a version with all the Medium-junk stripped away:

https://outline.com/UvNpVy

treeheckler• 7 years ago

It seems a bit overkill to spin up a new worker per segment, especially if encountering I/O bottlenecks. Why not make sure to distribute multiple segments to multiple threads on the same (large-enough) worker so it can stitch them all together from the same machine?

Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram

Related Stories