It turns out that the best pictures are taken from the last coach car and not the observation car.

Back in October, I was lucky enough to have been invited as a speaker at Demuxed, the conference for video devs.

The NeverEnding Story of replacing your transcoding pipeline

Back in 2019, we set upon replacing our aging transcoding pipeline. We’re in 2023 and the old system still hasn’t been deprecated. What is taking us so long?

In this talk, we’ll go over why we decided to build a new transcoding platform (goals, why not just improve the existing one, etc.), the challenges we faced (video, infrastructure or otherwise), how it (carefully) got rolled out to our users, and some lessons learned along the way.

For my Coast Starlight blog post, I needed the distance by train between Emeryville and Seattle and for some reason search engines cannot find anything useful (and LLMs just hallucinate).

It’s not on Amtrak’s website either. They used to have them as part of the timetables, but they’re not on the newer ones.

I had to resort to finding what I was looking for in this unofficial archive of Amtrak timetables.

Anyway, I have transcribed the distances in this GitHub repo and the results are visible here.

My first contribution to Vimeo’s engineering blog: Riding the dragon, an overview of Vimeo’s transcoding infrastructure.

It took about 7 months from the new draft to its publication. Mostly because it was often put on the back burner, and only really moved forward after I had to prepare my presentation on the same subject for the Paris Video Tech meetup.
Getting my post through an editor was an interesting experience, and made the result so much better.

Had to resort to using ffmpeg to create a timelapse because iMovie doesn’t let you do 4:3 movies for some reason, and I didn’t want to download a new video editor.

In a directory where the photos are named photo-00001.JPG to photo-00456.JPG (using macOS Finder’s batch renaming tool)

ffmpeg -f image2 -r 10  -i photo-%05d.JPG \
    -c:v h264_videotoolbox -b:v 8500k \
    -preset slowest -profile:v high \
    -allow_sw 1 output.mp4

-r 10 tells it to use 10 images per second