Livepeer was designed to help video engineers with affordable, reliable encoding. It is a free and open source software that can be used to encode video content for the next generation of video production software. Livepeer is funded by OXYGEN – the innovative platform which provides a community that can learn, share and create.
What is Livepeer?
Free and open source software used by video engineers to encode videos in the cloud. It is written in PHP, Javascript, JavaScript and NodeJS, and is backed by the open source community. Livepeer was developed to help video engineers with affordable, reliable encoding.
Video engineers are increasingly looking to use cloud computing to automate video delivery and sharing. This is largely due to their need to work with multiple partners and maintain a portfolio of assets that includes videos, music, 3D, content, and events. Livepeer enables these video professionals to write custom code and leverage the cloud to host, edit, modify and share video.
What does it do?
The Livepeer network is comprised of a global internet of things (IoT) consisting of 600,000 “farm” devices that help generate massive amounts of storage for TV shows and movies, allowing for rapid rendering of high quality videos at a lower cost.
The key to any codec is its ability to compress data. This compressing and decompressing is done by hardware inside the file server which eliminates the need for a hard drive. As a result, data transmission speeds are much faster.
How does it work?
LPT provides real-time encoding of motion pictures with a near-zero-latency design. Unlike traditional encoders, the feed queue of Livepeer is live working in real-time and never sleeps.
LPT leverages existing infrastructure such as DSL to scale to multi-gigabyte file sizes. LPT can work with torrents, torrent agents and multihomed mirrors, with no need for Internet connectivity. LPT is useful for web encoders that want to stream video directly into their website.
How is it open-source?
The Livepeer code is hosted on GitHub, and there are in-development versions of Livepeer released under the MIT License (LGPLv3).
Why should developers use it?
Livepeer is a versatile video compression software used in post-production of video content on a wide variety of production platforms. It is available in multiple languages.
Its unique architecture is the result of years of research and development. The team behind Livepeer is developing a decentralised platform with no central server and no application programming interface (API) to control its actions. Its architecture and design are open source to make sure that people around the world can benefit from it and help its development.
