Rendering video with high quality was always a difficult task. Probably because the subjective meaning of “high quality” is being pushed higher and higher every day. Remember when watching video in VGA quality in full screen was like science fiction? “In the future, it will be possible for a home PC to do it”, we said. But we didn’t imagine that we would so soon do it in 4K and over the internet!
Nevertheless it’s still a difficult task, in the sense that cutting edge technology is necessary to keep and push the quality bar even higher. With that in mind, Flixxo is proud to say that we’re going to leverage iExec’s expertise to help with the processing of video content. Before sharing on the network, videos need to be transcoded — decoded and then encoded again — into different formats so the viewers can select the best ones according the their screen sizes and bandwidth. This is required for smooth playback without pauses for buffering and stuttering, usually the video players automatically switch between streams with varying video quality in real time according to network congestion. Video encoding is a computing intensive task: its objective is to compress a video in a way that it uses little space and is fast to decode, usually at the expense of being hard to encode.
Enter cloud computing! iExec makes it easy and affordable to assign computing power for the encoding task and pay for the work with ERC20 tokens. And this is just one application that can interact with Flixxo, they are working on a decentralized marketplace for cloud resources.
The possibilities go further than that, as Flixxo nodes may even choose to participate in iExec’s network contributing their unused computing power. All this will be explored during the next months
“The possibilities go further than that, as Flixxo nodes may even choose to participate in iExec’s network contributing their unused computing power. All this will be explored during the next months.” said Pablo Carbajo, Flixxo´s CTO.
In the future, we are also aiming at streaming of live feeds. This represents another challenge: real time transcoding. This means that one stream from a single source needs to be converted on the fly to different resolutions to better serve different devices with different bandwidth and screen sizes. However with a powerful cloud computing backbone it is currently possible to do that more affordable than ever before.
In the words of Jean-Charles Cabelguen, Chief Innovation & Adoption at iex.ec “Flixxo is the perfect example of dApps proposing needed services that will define new standards of the future of the digital. At iExec we are pleased to provide a platform allowing Flixxo to fulfill its mission.”
Even farther in the future… how soon before we are transmitting holografic content over the internet? For sure the Holodeck could use a good encoding platform and good p2p sharing network for multiplayer support…
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