Moving Pictures: Implementing Video On Flickr

Moving Pictures
Implementing Video on Flickr
Cal Henderson
Hello
Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 2

Flickr
• Large scale kitten sharing website
• Started 2003, launched 2004

– 5 years old this december
• Almost 3 billion photos

Enter: Video
• Video was added this year

– Launched April 2008
• Many hundreds of thousands of videos

uploaded
• Many millions of playbacks

“Video? That’s just
like photos!”
-Me, before Flickr Video

12 4 Steps
• 4 main tasks
– Uploading
– Transcoding
– Storage
– Serving & Playback

1.
Upload
Simple upload
• Web forms
– Just like any other file
<form action="/uploadify/" method="post"

enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="file" name="fred" /> <input type="submit"
value="Go!" />
</form>
• But files are large / huge

Issues
• Two components for uploading:

– Sending from the client
– Receiving on the server
• Both of these present problems

Sending from the client
• Multiple options
– Simple form
– Flash
– Desktop app

Simple Forms
• Pros
– Very easy to implement
– Works on every browser out of the box
• Cons
– Upload progress is harder
– ‘Slow’
– Select a single file at once

Flash
• Pros
– Upload progress is easy
– ‘Fast’
– Multi select of files
• Cons
– Harder to implement
– Flash isn’t quite ubiquitous

Desktop App
• Pros
– Upload progress is easy
– ‘Very fast’
– Multi select of files
– Drag and drop
• Cons
– Hard to develop
– Hard to deploy (relative to the web)
Making Progress
• Upload progress
– Not impossible with plain forms
– Just need to be able to query the upload
progress via AJAX
• Multiple machines
– The VIP issue
– Enter Perlbal

Making Progress
1. Browser starts upload

Web 1
Browser Load 2. Web server broadcasts

balancer
progress via UDP
3. Browser queries progress Web 2

via AJX call

Receiving on the server
• File uploads are slow
– Much slower than serving pages
• Apache processes are heavy

– Waste of resources
• Use a poll based server (like jetty)

Receiving on the server
• Or, use a buffering layer
– Perlbal is great for this
Slow Fast
Browser Buffer Server
• Or a lightweight Apache
– E.g. w/ mod_proxy

But wait
• It’s not just the first step that’s slow
• Moving files around between servers is

slow
– Do it out of band
• Asynchronous jobs are in order anyway

– Do it!

2.
Transcode
Transcode?
• Why transcode at all?
• Input comes from many sources

– Point & shoots
– DV Cams
– Mobile devices
– Video editing software
• All in different formats

So many formats
• But very few of these formats can be
played back cross platform
– Without special software or hardware
• Formats are designed to do one thing well

– They don’t always manage even that
• Transcoding puts all videos on an equal

footing
Video file basics
• Most file types are really just containers
– MOV, FLV, AVI
• The data inside can be in multiple formats

– We call these codecs (encoder + decoder)
• Files contains multiple ‘streams’

– Both audio and video

Interleave
• Audio and video are often interleaved
– Hence AVI
• A video file looks like this:

– Headers
– Video chunk
– Audio chunk
– Video chunk
– Audio chunk
– Etc
Compress
• Raw video files are huge
– A bitmap for every frame
– Rarely used, even in post production
• At 30 fps, that gets crazy pretty quickly
• We don’t need to store every frame

– Static backgrounds don’t change (much)
between frames

Compresssss
• Intraframe
– Treat each frame as a picture
– Compress it (just like JPEG)
– DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform)
• Interframe
– Store the differences between frames
– Treat the pixels as a 3D array to be
compressed
The IPB
• Three frame types: I, P & B
• Intra coded pictures

– A full raw frame
• Predicted pictures
– Based on a single reference frame
• Bi-predictive pictures
– Based on two or more reference frames
IPBIPBIPBIPB
• Reference frames may be I, P or B
• P & B frames may contain a mix of image

data and motion vector displacements
• I frames require the most bits

– Then P frames
– Then B frames

Bad terminology
• We should really say picture
– (Not frame)
– Because of interlacing
• Really, we encode fields not frames

– Picture is the general term
• And H.264 contains ‘slices’

– Sub-regions of the field
– ‘Macroblocks’ & ‘Artifacts’

I-Frames
• Also called Key Frames
• Allow easy random seeking
• Twice a second for Digital TV & DVDs
• More widely spaced online

Seekable

Seekable

Oh, and audio too
• We can worry less about this
– Older problem, well solved
• MP3 is pretty good

– Who cares how it works?
• Syncing is the only issue

– Presentation Time Stamps (PTS) and Decode
Time Stamps (DTS) in MPEG-2
Flash! Woah-oh!
The big question:
Flash?
Non-flash sites
• QuickTime
• Windows Media
• This is gradually disappearing
• Flash player is ubiquitous

• Compression is good enough
• Interactive too
• But no 3D/VR as with QuickTime :(

The Flash Player
• Flash Player 6
– March 2002
• Video: Sorenson Spark (H.263)

• Audio: MP3
– Or ADPCM / Uncompressed
– Or Nellymoser Asao

Second Generation
• Flash Player 7
– August 2005
• Video: On2 TrueMotion VP6

• Audio: MP3

The hot shit
• Flash Player 9 (update 3)
– December 2007
• Video: H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10)

– w/ container formats from MPEG-4 Part 14
• Audio: AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3)
• Plus 3GPP Timed Text (MPEG-4 Part 17)

TrueMotion VP6
• Proprietary
• Reasonable compression
• Created by On2
– Patented
– Probably illegal for GPL code
• YouTube uses it for lower quality and old

streams

H.264
• Not proprietary
• Good compression
• MPEG Standard
– Open, but patented
– Patent licenses from the MPEG LA
– Unclear how this applies to (L)GPL code
– But probably badly
• YouTube using it for higher quality streams
• iPhones and AppleTV

Software
• Open source transcode tools
• FFmepg
– libavcodec for VP6
– Probably illegal – dubious
– Also pretty shoddy
– Can only decode H.264

More software
• MEncoder
– libmpcodecs uses libavcodec
• VLC
– libvlc uses libavcodec
• So basically the same

– Different muxing, same codecs

Free H.264?
• Unfortunately, not really
• x264 is the only usable one

– It’s pretty good
– MEncoder can use it
– Still limited in options at this point
– Again, dubiously legal

Non-free tools
• Flash encoder
– Not automatable
• On2 FlixEngine
– Creators of VP6
– Windows or Linux
– Some support for H.264
• Rhozet Carbon Coder

– The new hot shit
– Good H.264 support
– Windows

Choices
• Video codec
• Resolution
• Bitrate (VBR, CBR)
• Keyframes
• Audio codec
– Channels
– Bit depth
– Sampling rate

Doing it at scale
• Not really a problem
• Very easily parallelizable
• Amazon EC2 is awesome here

– Exactly what it was design for
– Grow/shrink as needed
– But, per-CPU software licensing

3.
Store
Easy!
• Really, just like photos

– But with bigger files
• Same disk layout as any other serving
• But the serving part is slower

But..
• Remember the files are huge
• Operations take time

– More likely to fail halfway through
– Checksums are your friend
• Do it all asynchronously

4.
Serve & Playback
The choice
Streaming
vs
Progressive
Streaming
• Pros
– Easily seekable
– Live feeds
• Cons
– Special server software
– Slower to start
– Firewall troubles

Progressive download
• Pros
– Just use a web server
– Play offline
– Firewall/proxy friendly
• Cons
– Harder to seek ahead (but not impossible)

Streaming tech
• Non flash stuff
– We’ll ignore that
– You’re using flash, right?
• RTMP
– Real-time Messaging Protocol
– Proprietary (thanks Adobe!)

RTMP
• RTMP - Raw TCP socket stuffs
• RTMPT – RTMP tunneled over HHTP
– For firewalls, etc
• Flash Media Server

– previously Flash Communication Server
• Wowza Pro
– $1000/server

Open source
• It’s not all bad
• Red5
– Java implementation of RTMP server
– Mostly feature complete
– Beta quality, but usable in production
– Facebook

Progressive
• Used by the majority of large sites
• Very simple!
• Seekable with server support

Seeking
• Serve the FLV starting at a different point
• Just add a simple FLV preamble before

seeking into the file
• Simple to do in PHP, Perl, etc

• mod_flvx for Apache
• mod_secdownload for lighttpd
5.
Other considerations

Review
• Videos are slow
• Expensive to review
• Review grids
– Doesn’t cover audio

Not enough?
• Social tools are useful here

Summary

Summing up
• Flash makes sense

– For uploading too
• H.264 is probably your best bet today
• Transcoding software still costs money
– Unless you’re willing to take on the risk
• Progressive download is basically
awesome

The end!

Awesome!
These slides are available online:

iamcal.com/talks/

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Moving Pictures

Implementing Video on Flickr

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 2

• Large scale kitten sharing website

• Started 2003, launched 2004

• Almost 3 billion photos

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 3

• Video was added this year

• Many hundreds of thousands of videos

• Many millions of playbacks

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 4

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 10

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 11

<form action="/uploadify/" method="post"

• But files are large / huge

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 13

• Two components for uploading:

• Both of these present problems

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 14

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 15

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 16

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 17

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 19

1. Browser starts upload

Browser Load 2. Web server broadcasts

3. Browser queries progress Web 2

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 20

• Apache processes are heavy

• Use a poll based server (like jetty)

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 21

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 22

• Moving files around between servers is

• Asynchronous jobs are in order anyway

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 23

• Input comes from many sources

• All in different formats

• Formats are designed to do one thing well

• Transcoding puts all videos on an equal

• The data inside can be in multiple formats

• Files contains multiple ‘streams’

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 27

• A video file looks like this:

• At 30 fps, that gets crazy pretty quickly

• We don’t need to store every frame

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 29

• Intra coded pictures

• P & B frames may contain a mix of image

• I frames require the most bits

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 32

• Really, we encode fields not frames

• And H.264 contains ‘slices’

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 33

• Allow easy random seeking

• Twice a second for Digital TV & DVDs

• More widely spaced online

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 34

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 35

Web 2.0 Expo NYC, 17th September 2008 36

• MP3 is pretty good

• Syncing is the only issue

The big question:

• Flash player is ubiquitous