Introducing Parallel Transcoding to Speedup Video Compression!

The speed of compression greatly affects our experiences of video compressing. Compared to different online video compressors, the advantages and disadvantages of redpandacompress.com are both obvious.

Pros:

1. It is completely free with unlimited usage of video compression, as long as it is a file under 2GB.
2. Since compression happens in your browser, you don’t need a video upload or download step and it helps especially when you have a slow internet connection.
3. Choosing an accurate output size is available.

Cons:

1. It is too slow. Compared to most free online video compressors, Redpanda Compress might sometimes take more than 20 minutes to compress a one-min 1080p video.
2. It is hard to choose the optimal video size under the trade-off between file size and image quality.

The transcoding speed is greatly limited by your browser and there are little things we could do about it. Luckily, through some investigation, a great approach is found to improve the video compression speed. Here we introduce a new update: Parallel Transcoding! (check out the principle of video compression if you are interested)

The most challenging part about this solution is that:

1. A custom-built ffmpeg webassembly that can support remux and concatenation without transcoding. Ref: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate
2. A sophisticated system to manage the video data from different workers and coordinate media jobs and their raw video buffers.

After days of hard work, redpandacompress.com now has an experimental parallel transcoding pipeline! The number of parallel workers is determined by the number of CPU cores on your device browser.

In general, it would at least have a speedup of 2X than the previous version. We hope that we can bring the best online video compression experience to everyone for free. If you find anything else interesting or need some other features, please don’t hesitate to contact me at fei@redpandacompress.com.