What is NukeVideo?
NukeVideo is an open-source, self-hosted video processing and delivery engine. It handles the core pipeline — uploading, encoding, and serving video via adaptive bitrate streaming — so you can integrate it into your own backend.
Why NukeVideo?
Most video solutions are either expensive SaaS products or full-blown platforms tightly coupled to their own frontend. NukeVideo takes a different approach: it provides just the video engine — upload, process, deliver — and stays out of the way so you can build your own product on top:
- Self-hosted — Your data stays on your servers.
- Scalable — Add worker and proxy nodes as your needs grow.
- Flexible — Define custom encoding templates for any use case.
- Open source — Inspect, modify, and contribute to the codebase.
Key Features
Video Processing Pipeline
Upload a video and NukeVideo handles the rest — downloading the original, transcoding into multiple formats, extracting thumbnails, generating storyboards, and uploading processed files to S3 storage.
Encoding Templates
Define reusable encoding configurations with custom video/audio streams, resolutions, bitrates, and codecs. Apply them to any video with a single API call.
Distributed Architecture
NukeVideo supports two types of nodes:
- Worker nodes — Handle video encoding jobs distributed by workload (light, medium, heavy).
- Proxy nodes — Serve video content via Nginx VOD module with adaptive bitrate streaming.
Streaming & VOD
Deliver content in HLS, DASH, or direct MP4 with secure token validation and S3-backed storage. The Nginx VOD module handles on-the-fly packaging without pre-segmenting files.
Analytics & Monitoring
Track bandwidth consumption, encoding progress, and node health through ClickHouse-powered analytics.
How It Works
Upload → S3 → Webhook → Download → Encode → Upload → Stream- A video file is uploaded to S3 storage via multipart upload.
- A webhook notifies NukeVideo that a new file is ready.
- A worker node downloads the original and starts encoding based on the template.
- Processed streams (video, audio, subtitles) are uploaded back to S3.
- Proxy nodes serve the content via HLS/DASH with token-based access control.