dbaplus Community

May 10, 2026 · Operations

How a Single FFmpeg Command Can Cut CDN Video Bandwidth Costs by 90%

An investigation revealed that a 1 GB MP4 video streamed to 2,500 users consumed 120 TB of CDN bandwidth because the file’s moov box was placed at the end and the audio‑video tracks were poorly interleaved, causing thousands of HTTP 206 range requests; moving the moov box to the file header with a simple ffmpeg command eliminated the excess requests and reduced bandwidth usage to the video’s actual size.