[HN Gopher] Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare
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       Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare
        
       Author : heftykoo
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2026-03-10 08:41 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (kentcdodds.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (kentcdodds.com)
        
       | Doohickey-d wrote:
       | You can do this all in fly.io, no cloudflare container needed.
       | 
       | The whole selling point of fly is lightweight and fast VMs that
       | can be "off" when not needed and start on-request. For this, I
       | would:
       | 
       | Set up a "peformance" instance, with auto start on, and auto-
       | restart-on-exit _off_, which runs a simple web service which
       | accepts an incoming request, does the processing and upload, and
       | then exits. All you need is the fly config, dockerfile, and
       | service code (e.g. python). A simple api app like that which only
       | serves to ffmpeg-process something, can start very fast (ms).
       | Something which needs to load e.g. a bigger model such as whisper
       | can also still work, but will be a bit slower. fly takes care of
       | automatically starting stopped instances on an incoming request,
       | for you.
       | 
       | (In my use case: app where people upload audio, to have it
       | transcribed with whisper. I would send a ping from the frontend
       | to the "whisper" service even before the file finished uploading,
       | saying "hey wake up, there's audio coming soon", and it was
       | started by the time the audio was actually available. Worked
       | great.)
        
         | michaelbuckbee wrote:
         | That's a good trick (the "get ready" ping). It reminds me of
         | how early Instagram was considered fast because they did the
         | photo upload in the background while you were typing your
         | caption so that by the time you hit "upload" it was already
         | there and appeared instantly.
        
       | detuks wrote:
       | I would not suggest using cloudflare containers for ffmpeg. Feels
       | like it is the nost expensive product they have. Queue to aws
       | spot instances or just have dedicated hetzner machine
        
       | thadk wrote:
       | Ffmpeg.WASM is really good and might manage all these steps
       | before even uploading.
        
       | DanielHB wrote:
       | Not really related to the topic, but I recently set up a baby-cam
       | with ffmpeg by just telling ffmpeg to stream to the broadcast
       | address on my home network and I can now open the stream from VLC
       | on any device in the household.
       | 
       | A very heavy-handed solution, but super simple. A single one-
       | liner. Just thought to share a weird trick I found.
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-14 23:00 UTC)