Free green transcoding: professional ABR encoding on surplus solar

Our industry runs always-on encoders and racks of servers, flies to NAB and IBC, commutes daily to offices, and then labels a landing page green. iReplay.tv went the other way and made the constraint real: our encoders run only when the solar panels in Brittany are producing more electricity than the site consumes. No excess, no processing. Jobs queue and start on their own when surplus appears and an encoder is free, which is why the service is free rather than discounted.

What you submit and what you get back

• Submit URLs to your video files: Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube or any direct link.
• You get multi-bitrate HLS back at 1080p, 540p and audio-only, ready for OTT, FAST and VOD-to-Live channels.
• Auto-generated thumbnails and preview GIFs come with it, and everything is downloadable as a single ZIP with all segments.
• Encoding runs on low-power Mac Minis with Apple VideoToolbox hardware acceleration; you can override the ffmpeg settings if you need specific ones.

Verifiable rather than claimed

The page shows live solar production, how many encoders are available and how many jobs are in the queue, read every minute from an Ecojoko sensor on our own grid connection. At night the queue simply waits for sunrise. Signing in with LinkedIn lets you track jobs and download the results.

Want the output checked before it goes live? The Streaming Analyzer scores a rendition ladder against best practice and the Video Quality Analyzer opens the frames themselves. iReplay.tv is run by a collective of streaming and broadcast engineers; you can also hire streaming and broadcast specialists.