Well, we’ve been on the new transcoders for one week now, and I’m excited to see the impact.

Last night was the first night where I was able to initiate an automated transcode of an episode shortly after we signed off the air.

There are still some things I need to work out.  For example, I could not initiate the conversion until I had imported the photos, because the transcoder uses the episode’s image for the ID3 cover art on MP3 transcodes.  So after I finished choosing and uploading the images for last night’s show, I fired the transcoder.

Here’s the log output:

Episode 314 Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create Thumbnail Files Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create LD File Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create HD File Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create WEBM File Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create MP3 File Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create SD File Begin:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:01 EDT 2013
  Create Thumbnail Files Complete:  Tue Sep 24 20:49:57 EDT 2013 (0d 0h 0m 56s)
  Create MP3 File Complete:  Tue Sep 24 20:56:55 EDT 2013 (0d 0h 7m 54s)
  Create LD File Complete:  Tue Sep 24 21:37:23 EDT 2013 (0d 0h 48m 22s)
  Create WEBM File Complete:  Tue Sep 24 22:39:23 EDT 2013 (0d 1h 50m 22s)
  Create SD File Complete:  Tue Sep 24 22:40:07 EDT 2013 (0d 1h 51m 6s)
  Create HD File Complete:  Tue Sep 24 23:20:05 EDT 2013 (0d 2h 31m 4s)
  Move Master File Begin:  Tue Sep 24 23:20:05 EDT 2013
  Create Master File Complete and Finish Job:  Tue Sep 24 23:20:05 EDT 2013 (0d 2h 31m 4s)

It was less than 8 minutes after I initiated the transcoder that the MP3 RSS feeds received the new episode.  Just a little more than 48 minutes after initiating the transcoder, the Low Definition (LD) file completed.  The show went up on the web site almost immediately after that (the files first get sync’d to our CDN and then added to the database, automatically).

All files (MP3, LD, SD, HD and WEBM) were complete in just 2 hours 31 minutes 4 seconds, including all distribution, even cross-uploading to Blip.TV (also automated now).

From 17 hours to only 2.5 hours.  This thing is incredible.

And that means, on average, we’ll be able to transcode nearly 10 episodes per day — almost double the turnaround of our first week.  That means the job which was estimated to take 72 days on our main server alone has been cut to only a day or two longer than one month.  In just one month from now, all back episodes – six years worth of Category5 TV – will be transcoded.