The bandwidth requirements for video miners are based on the amount of video data that needs to be uploaded and downloaded during transcoding.

The amount of available bandwidth will not only impact the number of streams that can be transcoded on a machine, but also the speed of data upload/download which needs to be fast so that video streaming applications can receive transcoded results as soon as possible.

The amount of bandwidth required for a stream will depend on the bitrate of the source stream and the bitrate of the output renditions. The download bandwidth required for a single stream can be roughly estimated as the bitrate of the source stream. The upload bandwidth required for a single stream can be roughly estimated as the sum of the bitrates of each of the output renditions for the stream. As a result, the total number of streams that can be transcoded given a certain amount of available of bandwidth will vary.

While there is not a strict bandwidth requirement for video miners, past testing has demonstrated that 1G upload/download bandwidth is a good starting point if possible. If you do not have access to this amount of bandwidth you will still be able to transcode on the network, but you will have a lower ceiling on the number of streams you will be able to handle.

Upload/download bandwidth available can be tested with tools such as:

  • speedtest
    • By default the tool will run a bandwidth test against the closest public server, but there is also an option to run the test against a specified public server
    • Note: The results of this test also depend on the available bandwidth on the server used
  • iperf3
    • This tool can be run on client and server machines that you have access to
    • If you have access to a machine with good bandwidth availability in a region that you expect/want to receive streams from, then this tool will likely be more useful than speedtest