The benefits of externalizing your transcoding service

Out-of-the-box transcoding services are good, but for enterprise brands externalized media transcoding can reduce costs

At iSoftStone, we’re all about great customizations and tailored solutions that help our clients reduce operational costs, improve performance, and deliver solid ROI. While DAMs like Nuxeo provide excellent binary transcoding out of the box, it’s not the right solution for every organization, especially those with heavy transcoding loads. If that’s you, then externalizing your media transcoding service might be your path forward. 

Let’s take a closer look at why.  

When you upload video, audio, or image files to your DAM, it automatically formats the file, based on content type. For example, when rendering a video file a platform like Nuxeo will: 

1. 1. Extract the video information. 
   2. Extract binary metadata. 
   3. Transcode the video to one or more conversions, such as WEBM or 360P MP4. 
   4. Create a storyboard. 
   5. Create preview images in the DAM of different resolutions.

 

That seems like a smooth process, and for many businesses it is. However, there are scalability issues. To do the conversions, the DAM fetches the file storage to its local file system. If you upload 100–150 image files at the same time, it slows down the platform’s performance and you start to feel the shared service.  

Then there’s cost: Using dedicated processor nodes at scale could be expensive. And not all the formats your team might need are available through Nuxeo marketplace add-ons.  

If you’re an enterprise organization with extensive amounts of video content, an out-of-the-box transcoding service probably isn’t going to be the most efficient or sustainable solution for your team. 

 

Customized transcoding solutions by iSoftStone

To address these scale and performance issues, iSoftStone’s retail solution experts can redesign and implement transcoding as a separate and external service so that DAMs like Nuxeo don’t need to fetch the file content.  

With externalized transcoding, the binary is sent outside of the Nuxeo infrastructure to either your on-premises server or to a serverless compute engine like AWS Fargate which does the transcoding externally and sends it back in. Kafka can be leveraged for the message exchanges so the Nuxeo server and the transcoding server can continue to work independently. Third-party plug-ins handle all the different formatting and media conversions you need.  

 

Why externalize your media transcoding service?

• Takes the load off servers, reducing lag and freeing up bandwidth. 
• Offers the ability to create and process file formats not natively supported. 
• Reduces hosting costs, depending on your configuration. 
• Tunes capacity and performance to your organization’s specific needs and workloads. 
• It’s platform agnostic and can be used as a stand-alone service. 
• The DAM ingestion workflow remains exactly the same for users. 

 

In summary, if you externalize your media transcoding service, you retain all the upsides of out-of-the-box binary transcoding but gain additional functionality, compatibility, and performance. You’ll get more flexibility and a service that’s tailored to the needs and budget of your organization.  

Curious to hear more? As a strategic partner of Nuxeo since 2018, iSoftStone has more experience than any other Nuxeo systems integrator. If you’re interested in externalizing your media transcoding services, or our other expertise, please reach out. We’re here to help.