I wanted to introduce myself to the community for what I can offer, why I’m doing this and where I have been.
As the name suggest I’m a professional engineer with full life cycle development for multiple platforms. I have been heavily vested in video work flows since 2010 when I helped take a product for video transmit, capture and playback and turn it into a service that the original company never saw coming by adding a complete RESTful API. The releasing company (AMX) even nick named the project after me because of had been accomplished. From that point forward I knew being an engineer that understood video on network transports would be key.
I have released commercial products that performed conversion of native RTSP streams to create SIP dialable end-point for Video Teleconferencing. To ensure I understood the networking aspects that went along with the code I completed by Cisco CCNA in 2013 which I use actively to configure route/switch to support both unicast and multicast video workflows.
Crypto-currency has been a passion since I found it in 2015, so I asked myself why did I miss the early years of crypto-currency and it turns out I was busy having my first child followed by my second only a couple of years later. That did not stop me from contributing to platforms though, I published numerous patches to githubs mostly for a coin named Burst that was a JAVA based “proof-of-capacity”.
Lets talk about the real issue now that you know about me. Why delegate/bond to my transcoder? First the fee is extremely low at only 0.2%, one of the lowest within the market place. The machine running the node is a dedicated multi-GPU machine running quad AMD RX-470s 8gb editions. In the three weeks the node has been running it has not missed a single reward claim. I have pushed the price per segment to the very bottom for transcoding to ensure we can get work and collect benchmarks.
Which leads to an interesting article I read. The processor map of a standard GPU in theory can mine traditional crypto-currencies performing proof-of-work and transcode video with little or no impact to the other service. We aim to prove if this is viable and provide supporting documentation to the community once complete. I am actively working with a member of the LP development team who I have provided full root access to the node therefore ensuring it is optimally configured and always up to date. I trust this individual with everything I have to include allowing access to my Eth private keys.
If you want to support growth of the platform by forging new ground please consider delegating stake.
Great question. With what I hope to be an equally acceptable answer.
Earning will be paid when one of two scenarios are met (which ever happens first).
7 Days have elapsed and the earning are greater than the network fees
OR
The total earning exceeds 0.25Eth
The goal will be to have this functionality put into a cron job on the transcoder that can evaluate the circumstances as described in order to pay out earning.
Just wanted to provide an update to my transcoder. Yesterday we lowered the Reward cut to 0.18% which at the time is the lowest transcoding fee of active transcoders. We have passed 30 days of up time with 100% uptime and 0 missed calls for rewards. I have also added the Reward Cut, Fee Share and Price to the main topic as the first three lines so you don’t have to hunt for the information.
Thought this might be fun for all. A photo of the transcoder (0x71d) that we are using for livepeer. This was a former full time crypto-mining rig but now is livepeer first.
Hello, I received the following message from Transcoder bot: “WARNING - Transcoder 0x71d832… did not yet claim rewards at block 503 of 5760 in the current round!”. Could you please explain the reason for the missing claim! Thanks
Just got home from a 10 hour drive. Were investigating what happened. The entire machine was in a “non-responsive state” which required some Alt+SysReq magic to get it back. Initially we thought it was maybe out of HDD but that was not the case. As soon as we figure out why we will publish what happened to help develop a better product but since we have manually claimed the reward, a little late but we didn’t miss it, still a flawless record. Thanks for keeping us honest.
We are still looking into the “lock up” but as an added precaution we have added to the system Pingdom a paid service by Solar Winds to monitor the Transcoder. This will provide us real time monitoring where ever we may be. Happy Transcoding.
Hi @TheEngineer - just checking in re: your progress as a Transcoder.
I see you’ve dropped out of the active set - sad to see that.
But I also see you’ve dropped your reward cut - I’m keen to know what are your plans for how to proceed in terms of supporting the network? Perhaps you can share?
@chrishobcroft : Thank you for noticing we have dropped our reward cut. We are going to 0%. I have been working with a member of the LP team on the transcoder and we both feel it’s so important to te community to have systems available that are dedicated and reliable that we have dropped the cut to 0%, yes for all you people looking for a place to delegate to, it does not get better than this. The LP team member that I am directly working with has transfered directly to me some LPT to compensate for the cut to 0%.
As for supporting the network were actaully doing a couple of things. We still intend to publish a white paper about Transcoding and Traditional PoW on the same GPUs and evaluate the impact to both services. As you can see we had an issue a couple of days ago with the transcoderr becoming unresponsive that we are still looking at. The end goal with that and some of the scripts we are working on is to provide back to the community code snipettes/open source pieces that help with common issues or protect from potential issues.
When work loads begin we expect to be able to handle nearly anything that’s thrown at us. With the reward cut of 0% we will be increasing the work costs to what we would expect to see in a production environment which will enable our delegates to get their just desserts in additional to 100% of their own stake weights.
