munnerz/kube-plex

A question about distribution of transcoding

cyclingwithelephants opened this issue · 1 comments

Hey folks,

Sorry I have a small question about this awesome piece of software.

Is it possible to distribute one transcode job over multiple pods or is it 1 transcoding pod per video stream?

Krm1t commented

My guess would be no - Although not really my area of expertise.

Think about it.
You (the client) want to watch a movie
so plex tells you to connect to a pod called P1
P1 then tells 2 other pods (P2 and P3) to split the transcode of the movie between them
but because it is a movie you need it to come in order i.e. first bit first and last bit last.
Therefore P1 needs to return the data to the client in order thereby negating the gain by having 2 pods doing the work.
Also i would think that the overhead of having a 'load balancer' to manage the transcode would be detrimental to the viewing experience.

As i said this isn't really my area of expertise but no seems like the most logical answer especially since kube-plex is more of a mod to the existing plex image rather than a built in feature.