Video processing is a very CPU-heavy operation and we all know NodeJS and its single-threaded nature so another thing that had to be done was to offload work to another process ( child_process). The next question was how to make that software available for all environments without much hassle, the obvious answer was containerizing the whole app using Docker. In our research, we figured that the backend app ( NodeJS/Express) will have to use some sort of already existing processing software, the most popular software we came across was FFmpeg. Our solution was inspired by a couple of other articles but we had to adjust all solutions for the production environment and simplicity. From my Javascript background, I assumed it would be as simple as npm install “some video compressor”, it turned out to be a much more complex process and this is how we managed to do it. We had to implement some video compression solution for it. If the user is only on a bit slower internet it would take a long time for the video to event load bit by bit. While working on a social media app primarily used for content sharing we came across the problem with video playback for user-uploaded videos. Video compression API - NodeJS/Express, Docker, FFmpegĬreate an API that compresses videos up to 10x while maintaining maximum quality.

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