Morph: A Fast and Scalable Cloud Transcoding System

Abstract

Morph is an open source cloud transcoding system. It can leverage the scalability of the cloud infrastructure to encode and transcode video contents in fast speed, and dynamically provision the resources in cloud to accommodate the workload. The system is composed of a master node that performs the video file segmentation, concentration, and task scheduling operations; and multiple worker nodes that perform the transcoding for video blocks. Morph can transcode the video blocks of a video file on multiple workers in parallel to achieve fast speed, and automatically manage the data transfers and communications between the master node and the worker nodes. The worker nodes can join into or leave the transcoding cluster at any time for dynamic resource provisioning. The system is very modular, and all of the algorithms can be easily modified or replaced. We release the source code of Morph under MIT License, hoping that it can be shared among various research communities.