DevConf.CZ 2020

Video streaming can be quite demanding of user data - especially when your main market is Africa, with its challenging connectivity and relatively high data prices.

My presentation is the story of how we started using next generation codecs at Showmax. Since the ‘new’ codecs are significantly slower when processing videos - and our current implementation can take up to 3.5x the video duration to encode a video - we had to implement a pipeline to encode videos in parallel. WIth more codecs came more responsibility, so we also needed to implement special handling in APIs per device type and category.

By the end of the talk, the audience will see how we managed to transfer 30% less data, have more control over our process, and cut the encoding times up to 0.12x video duration - all while keeping the same quality.