How Facebook encodes videos
I'm surprised Facebook still uses software to do video encoding.<p>Most big companies with millions of hours of video uploaded each day have realised it's cheaper to stick a bunch of hardware video encoding chips onto an accelerator board and be able to transcode 100 HD streams simultaneously into all the formats and resolutions you need to host.<p>The power savings on CPU's pay for the custom hardware in a matter of months.<p>It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.