

Zencoder lowers the price for encoding to multiple output formats - brandonarbini
http://zencoder.com/encoder-blog/2011/03/09/lower-price-for-multiple-outputs/

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e1ven
I'm not trolling, I have a honest question- What do I get with Zencoder,
versus the free Transcoding I get through Softlayer (<http://bit.ly/hmDGtu>)

Even if I didn't already have a Softlayer server, it seems like it'd be
cheaper to get one of those then hire Zencoder for many cases.

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jon_dahl
Fair question. What you get is scalability (Softlayer is explicitly for low-
volume transcoding), an API (Softlayer might have one, though it's not
documented at the above link), a lower error rate, higher visual quality,
better compression, more options, and hands-on customer support. Not everyone
needs these things, but many people do.

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amock
This isn't as interesting as I hoped it would be from reading the title. It
looks like the only technical aspect of this is caching the input file, which
makes sense but isn't very exciting. Is there any work being done on sharing
some of the encoding work between different resolutions of the same codec? I
don't know a lot about video codecs but it seems like you might be able to
encode the higher resolution video and save some of the intermediate data to
use with the lower resolution video to at least provide hints.

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brandonarbini
This is mostly about the business side of things. Many of our customers are
encoding to multiple formats to deliver a better user experience and we wanted
our pricing to adapt.

Technically, we encode all of the outputs for a file in parallel across
multiple transcoding servers. We're looking for ways to reduce the number of
steps involved in moving an input file through the system which may result in
some sort of forking of the decode to multiple simultaneous encodes, but that
remains to be seen.

