Mikrowave Media Processor
One pipeline from mezzanine to multi-DRM HLS and DASH. SourceIntelligence builds a bitrate ladder for every title, every rendition is quality-checked, Dolby Atmos® is built in, and the fleet costs nothing while idle.
The pipeline
Submit a source. Mikrowave encodes every rendition, checks the quality, packages and encrypts the output, and delivers the manifests to your origin. One job, one audit trail.
The platform
Mikrowave is a media pipeline orchestrator. Encoding is one workload it runs. Anything that runs on Linux can run inside it, with the same queue, the same fleet, the same guarantees.
One orchestrator hands each job to the right fleet: video, audio, spatial audio, or the workload you add. Per-tenant priorities, one queue, one dashboard, one API. Every step from source to manifest runs under the same control.
A job is claimed, heartbeated, and requeued if its host disappears. The source is verified before a frame is encoded. Quality gates decide what ships. Every decision lands in an audit record before the callback fires.
Every rendition and codec encodes in one pass. Every DRM family packages in parallel. Fleets grow on queue depth and new capacity arrives in minutes. Releases roll without stopping a single encode.
Your own encoder. A QC pass. A watermarking step. A delivery hook into your CMS. If it runs on Linux, it becomes a workload with the same fleet, the same guarantees and the same audit trail as everything else.
Everything in one box
Clear, Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay outputs are produced together, with separate keys per SD, HD, UHD and audio tier. One job serves every platform from one master playlist and one MPD.
Per-codec renditions from a single source pass. HEVC where the client can, AVC everywhere else.
VMAF and SSIM scores on every rendition, checked against the floors you set. A rendition that misses its floor never ships.
SRT in, continuous HLS and DASH out. Periodic manifest merges and S3 syncs while the stream runs.
A bitrate ladder built for each title, not for the average one. Learn more ›
Thumbnail strips for scrubbing, a poster still for the catalogue, and subtitle tracks. Delivered in the same manifest as the streams.
Per-title encoding
SourceIntelligence analyses each source, encodes candidate rungs, scores them against your quality floors, and validates the result on held-out scenes before committing. Then it encodes the ladder that won.
Bitrate of each delivered rung versus the same rung on the static ladder. This is what a viewer actually streams. Every ladder shown was validated on scenes the analysis never saw.
1080p still clears VMAF 90 on unseen scenes, at 1.2 Mb/s in H.264 and 0.8 Mb/s in HEVC. Static spends 6.0 Mb/s on the same rung.
The first validation pass caught every anchor just under target. One repair round raised them, and both rungs passed on unseen scenes.
Holding VMAF 88 at 720p takes 5.2 Mb/s here, not static's 3.0. At 1080p, 8.0 Mb/s buys 1.6 VMAF points over the static rung. It spends where the picture needs it.
Production analysis runs, September 2026. Headline figures compare the 1080p rung with the static ladder's 1080p rung at 6.0 Mb/s; the 720p rung is shown against static's 3.0 Mb/s. Quality targets: VMAF 88 at 720p and 90 at 1080p, measured on scenes held out from the analysis.
Audio and Dolby Atmos®
Batch audio from a single manifest: an AAC ladder with the right profile chosen for each bitrate, previews, verified outputs, and cover-art variants with dominant-colour extraction.
Dolby Atmos® masters are encoded through the Dolby® Encoding Engine to Dolby Digital Plus® with Dolby Atmos and Dolby AC-4®, with the master checked before encoding starts.
Dolby Atmos encoding uses the Dolby Encoding Engine, which is licensed and supplied separately by Dolby. Mikrowave orchestrates it; the software and license are not included.
Nothing uploads unless every rung passes. Nothing is reported complete unless every upload landed.
Orchestration
An orchestrator API hands jobs to worker agents by workload class. Video, audio and Dolby Atmos fleets autoscale on queue depth, and the video fleet shuts down completely when there is nothing to do.
Spot reclaim, instance terminate and lost heartbeats requeue the job. Operator cancel is final.
Pause, drain, roll, resume. Releases deploy without wasting an encode in flight.
Every deploy is a pinned version. Rollback is the same command with the previous one.
Audio and Dolby Atmos jobs run within fixed memory budgets, so one job can never starve another.
Deployment
The same worker runs in any cloud, on the desktop under your desk, and on the Mac in your bag. Every host registers with one orchestrator, pulls from one queue, and writes to one storage. Mix them freely.
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or any provider that hands you a Linux virtual machine, Arm or x86. Fleets scale on queue depth, all the way to zero when idle. Releases roll host by host without dropping a job, and interruptions requeue automatically.
A workstation, a home server, WSL2 or a VM. One command provisions it, one command ships a release. The planner pins one job per CPU complex so parallel encodes never fight over cache.
A laptop becomes a worker in one command. Native Arm build, no containers, no emulation, nothing installed outside your home folder. Close the lid and the fleet carries on.
Arm and x86-64 each get their own release build and their own encoder toolchain, compiled for that silicon. No emulation layers, no lowest-common-denominator binaries. Encoder decisions never depend on the host, so a small machine and a large one produce the same output, only at different speeds.
Developers
Submit from the dashboard, from your CMS, or from a script. Every job reports back to the URL you give it with a versioned delivery manifest, and leaves logs, an audit file and artifacts you can fetch afterwards.
# submit a title
curl -X POST https://mikrowave.example.com/api/jobs \
-H "X-Api-Key: $MIKROWAVE_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"profile": "hd_source_intelligence_encode",
"sidecar": { …source, audio tracks, subtitles… },
"callback_url": "https://your.app/hooks/mikrowave"
}'
# …later, at your callback URL
{ "status": "complete",
"outputs": { "hls": "…", "dash": "…", "ladder": { … } } }Specifications
† The Dolby Encoding Engine and its license are sold separately by Dolby and must be obtained from Dolby. Mikrowave drives the encoder; it does not include it.
Mikrowave is an Anghami project. If you work with video or audio, let’s talk shop and compare notes.