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Transcoding several live streams on Amazon EC2

Hi,

I am currently evaluating the costs of transcoding several livestreams in EC2. As far as I can tell only the recent g2.2xlarge instance type supports hardware accelerated transcoding (using NVENC). Intel Quick Sync and CUDA (on Linux) are not supported as far as I know. Has anyone tested how many parallel streams can be handled (when transcoding to 2-3 lower bitrates) by a single instance? I am looking at streams with a resolution of 640x480 with about 1.2MBps. Also are there any numbers on the more recent EC2 types c3.large, c3.xlarge, c3.2xlarge, etc. (the benchmarks provided on the transcoder forum are quite dated)?

with Best Regards

Konni

As a practical matter, I’ve found that it’s possible to do about 1 incoming transcode with 1 or maybe 2 output levels on c3.large. Not bad if you don’t have a heavy transcode load or are only doing audio, but don’t go too crazy with it.

Hi there,

The benchmarks are still relevant and a good comparison, baseline.

For maximum capacity you should use g2.2xlarge.

If you have not seen it yet, here is the guide for:

How to configure NVIDIA NVENC accelerated encoding on Amazon EC2 (G2, NVENC)

I hope this information is helpful, please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Salvadore

Thank you for your reply. Yes I did see the guide. If nothing goes wrong we will take the g2.2xlarge for a testrun. Currently I am unable to estimate the restrictions the videocard imposes on the transcoding process. But I hope we can achieve 10-20 channels for non-hd content when transcoding the stream into 2 lower bitrates.

Konni