Issue Nº.001 — Spring 2026
Cloud Transcoding Quarterly
Vol. 2 / The Pipeline

How it
works.

— The pipeline

Five stages, one job ID. Submit a file, the master chunks it on scene boundaries, the fleet encodes in parallel, and every chunk is verified before it ships.

— The promise

Deterministic output. The same source and preset produce a byte-identical result whether one worker ran it or forty.

— Run it
Read the docs →
01
Submit

Drop a file.
Get a job ID.

Point the web console, the API, or a watch folder at a source. The master probes it, validates it against the preset's source rules, and returns a job before the first chunk is cut.

web consolerest apiwatch foldernle plugin
POST /jobslive
$ curl -X POST https://master.studio.local:7443/jobs \
    -d '{"source_uri": "/vol/clip.mov",
        "preset_id": "youtube-4k-h264"}'
→ 201 created · 235 chunks planned
02
Chunk

Cut on
scene changes.

A scene-detect pass finds real cut points, then chunks are merged toward a target duration. Boundaries land where the encoder was going to insert a keyframe anyway — so no seams, no re-encode penalty.

scene-aware12s targetgop-aligneddeterministic
chunk boundarieslive
03
Distribute

Fan out to
every worker.

The scheduler matches each chunk to a worker that can actually encode it — right codec, right accelerator, right FFmpeg build. Slow workers get fewer chunks. Dead workers get their work reassigned.

capability matchauto-rebalance3 retriesheartbeats
fleet assignmentlive
wkr-a01
92%
wkr-a02
84%
wkr-a03
71%
wkr-b01
88%
04
Encode

FFmpeg,
in parallel.

Each worker runs a plain FFmpeg invocation you can read, copy, and debug. Progress streams back frame by frame — fps, bitrate, speed — so a job's state is never a guess.

nvenc / cudaqsvvideotoolboxcpu fallback
wkr-iad-a01 · ffmpeglive
frame= 14260 fps=184 q=23.0
bitrate=14723kbits/s speed=2.41x
05
Verify & ship

Prove it,
then deliver.

Every chunk is decoded and checksummed before concat. If a chunk drifts, it's re-encoded — not shipped. The finished master lands in your output directory with a manifest of exactly how it was made.

decode checkchecksummanifestwebhook
verificationlive
235chunks verified · 0 drift
128×
Realtime at fleet peak
47s
Submit → first frame out
0.00%
Codec drift, verified
4
Codecs, one pipeline
— Start encoding

Point it at a folder.
Get your frames back.

Install the master, join a worker, submit a job. Self-hosted and free to run on hardware you already own.

Self-hosted · your hardware, your network