Breaking Vendor Dependency Through Orchestration

Transcoding solutions tend to depend on external vendor solutions, and largely utilize ffmpeg under the hood. As a result, modifications can be costly, take unprecedented time, or both. Alternatively, solutions can be developed in house, which require resources and can impact timelines for other initiatives. As a result, I researched how open source orchestration frameworks (of which there are many) can be leveraged to create a variety of transcode systems using ffmpeg. The result was a system that can support multiple transcode pipelines for various use cases, integrate packagers as needed, and scale up ffmpeg nodes as needed. In summary, orchestration allows for low code, or no code, modifications to transcode pipelines, scales effectively, and allows for easy modifications to support needs as they arise (without impacting existing pipelines). This presentation will include a demonstration of how this was architected using Camunda, or Netflix Conductor, orchestration frameworks, and demonstrate how to make modifications to a transcode pipeline with no code changes required.