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