Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare • Hacker News Board

Re: Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

#21

Post by temp0826 » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #13

As a side note, learned today that I've been running basically zero hardware acceleration for video on linux despite having a respectable GPU. It's all been CPU and I didn't realize. nvidia-smi dmon is the linux command (for nvidia) - column "dec" tells you whether there is hw decode happening. This will work both for browser (youtube) and video player (mpv etc). I needed to make active changes on both to get it to a…

Some linux distros (e.g. fedora) don't include hw decoding for licensing reasons. I decided I wanted all the latest goodies at some point and ended up duct taping together a copr repo with mesa/ffmpeg/mpv (latest from git) with all the hw stuff enabled (though I'm probably breaking some of their rules by doing so...I've labeled it in such a way that I hope nobody comes across it and decides to use it). Anyways, my main goal with it all was to extend battery life on my laptop while watching things, it makes a pretty big difference to use proper codecs.

Re: Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

#22

Post by miyuru » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #17

This was kind of a wild read. It starts with > When I started building the Call Kent feature, I could have designed a proper job queue with a dedicated worker pool. But that would have been solving a scalability problem I did not yet have. "Start simple and iterate when reality tells you to" is still how I think about this. Reality finally told me. And then we find ourselves at > The signature uses HMAC-SHA256 with a…

I was confused too.

If I read the blog post correctly, this was to get a MP3 output from other audio sources. No video.

He could created a few bash files and run in locally, assuming he is in the USA save ton of money spent creating the messy situation.

Re: Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

#23

Post by DanielHB » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

pocksuppet wrote: post #8

DanielHB wrote: post #5

Not really related to the topic, but I recently set up a baby-cam with ffmpeg by just telling ffmpeg to stream to the broadcast address on my home network and I can now open the stream from VLC on any device in the household. A very heavy-handed solution, but super simple. A single one-liner. Just thought to share a weird trick I found.

It could be a little more efficient to use a multicast address. Even if you don't have any special multicast routing set up, all the receiving machines should be able to discard the traffic a bit earlier in the pipeline.

yeah I tried that for a bit but didn't manage to get multicasting to work. My internal network is fine even with the extra broadcast traffic. This is not a permanent installation, eventually I won't need the babycam anymore.

I saw some other solutions using nginx to serve the stream but that was much more complicated, just broadcasting is an one-liner (in a systemd daemon).