EC2 instance to transcode incoming 15 1080p channels to 5 profiles

I have some requirements from my client to do cloud transcoding instead of hardware transcoding. I’m yet to say yes to them as their requirements quite huge

15 incoming channels

13 of them will be 720p

2 of them will be 1080p

They want to output to :

720p ~ 1300kbps

480p ~ 1000 kbps

360p ~ 700 kbps

240p ~ 400 kbps

160p ~ 200 kbps

I’ve never done a 5 profile transcoding but I assume current G2.2x large capable taking 2 channels per server ? Or just 1 server for 1 channel ?

Thank you for your help.

Hi,

I would refer you to the Wowza Transcoder benchmarks.

The Server 8 specification given there is a High-CPU Extra Large Instance - c3.8xlarge.

You’ll see that this able to perform several channels of 4 transcodes, so adjust the channel numbers a little and you should still be able to get several channels

of 5 transcodes. With high performing instance like that you should only need a few such instances to meet your needs. I would recommend testing of course.

Daren

Hello,

Just to add to what Daren said, Amazon offers the G2.2x Large and G2.8x Xlarge instances, which support NVENC GPU acceleration. You may want to look into the Amazon Linux AMI with NVIDIA GRID GPU Driver pre-installed. You can install Wowza Streaming Engine onto this AMI to take advantage of the GPU processing features.

Please see the following article on EC2 NVENC enabled transcoding:

How to configure NVIDIA NVENC accelerated encoding on Amazon EC2

When doing large amounts of transcoding, these EC2 instances may be a good choice.

Best regards,

Andrew