About Encore¶

Encore is built and maintained by the Videocore team at SVT.

Project history¶

2018 — The initiative. SVT had a proprietary, inflexible transcoding solution that was overdue for licence and hardware renewal. Around that time, SVT runs Tekniksprint twice a year — a two-week period where a team picks a problem and innovates on it. A small team spent the sprint building a proof of concept, warts and all. It was hacky and demo-friendly (even had a GUI) but enough to prove the idea and win organisational buy-in for a proper rewrite.
2019 — Development. Written, tested, and in production the same year. Replaced the proprietary solution, delivering better quality and flexibility at a fraction of the cost of a comparable commercial stack. Also unlocked work on new codecs and transcoding features that would have been impossible on a closed system.
2020–2021 — Open sourcing. Done gradually across sprints: licence research, documentation, scrubbing SVT-specific code, splitting out reusable libraries. Released publicly in 2021.

2023 — STSWE23: Encore (video) — talk at Streaming Tech Sweden, covering Encore's design and the state of the project.
2021 — Encore: licensed to once again transcode — how and why SVT open-sourced Encore.
2018 — Encore: video transcoding at its core — earliest write-up; some code references are stale after the rewrite, but useful for project origins.