Cheers!
Next step - should be a server that simply coordinates video transcoding, and users can run an application on their computer which will do the transcoding when it’s idle and deliver the transcoded video back to the server. Like the rest of the Fediverse, make the community actually part of the community. I’m sure many of us would be happy to donate spare CPU time.
I’m not OP, but if transcoding is happening on user CPUs, it’s theoretically possible to modify or inject stuff into the transcoded video. There’d need to be some way of validating a transcode matches the original, which is non-trivial.
A consensus algorithm could work, but that would massively increase the required compute. I’m not even sure things like NVENC vs CPU ffmpeg are deterministic in how tbey compress video. Different encoders could very likely end up with visually identical transcodes, but the hashes wouldn’t always match.
Maybe someone else has a better idea for validating transcodes?
