Gregory's Server
Transcoding is no joke, for @pixelfed Stories, I decided to offload the transcoding process to your device so servers aren’t overwhelmed and the UX trade off in terms of users having to wait is ok
This doesn’t solve the quality issue, either we prioritize quality over disk space which benefits UX or prioritize disk space over quality which benefits instance admins.
I’m leaning towards prioritizing disk space for now, and am looking into HLS + delayed backend processing to solve this long term
@dansup @pixelfed I understand you are targeting mobile users mostly. How do you intend to offload transcoding to browser users?
More generally - most platforms transcode everything server side so that they can re-encode content again in newer profiles or codecs as needed, to validate uploads (everything is transcoded to common profiles) and to improve quality/space tradeoff (mobile encoders tend to be really poor).
But that means server bills, of course.