

AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder - jrnkntl
http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/

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sp332
Unless I'm missing something, this is nothing that can't already be done by
<http://Zencoder.com>

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terpua
Pay as you go pricing

HD @zencoder: $0.10 per minute HD @AET: $0.03 per minute

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sp332
Ok, thanks :)

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JosephRedfern
Seems quite expensive to me. Wouldn't it be cheaper to roll your own on a
(few) EC2 instances?

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zimbatm
Most people underestimate the cost of handling FFmpeg and all it's
particularities and the complexities inherent to each video format. Especially
if you support "any" format on the input you quickly end up spending a lot of
time dealing with heuristics (which evolve with each FFmpeg release).
Development and learning time might be a bigger cost than the potential
savings.

The target format is also really important. WebM is around twice as slow to
encode than h264 for the same resolution. And HD doubles the encoding time as
well.

Now if you look at the Spot instance market, you can have a c1.xlarge for
$0.07 / hour. Given that you can encode ~6 h264 SD videos in near real-time on
that instance, it would cost you ~0.0002 / minute of video (if you don't need
other infrastructure services). This is the bottom-line.

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shortsightedsid
Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used
for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized
software. Take a look at [http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-
EN/Products-and-S...](http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-
and-Services/Video-Infrastructure/Encoders).

FFMPEG is great for personal use but unlikely to be used in production
systems.

1\. Its not "enterprisy". By that mean there is company behind the codecs who
can provide support 24x7 on quality issues, robustness, warrenties etc.. 2\.
The ugly word - Patent covered. A lot of video technology has licensing and
patenting. The moment sometime as big as Amazon tries to use a codec, the
sharks will line up unless they have the right license.

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zimbatm
We're not talking about broadcasting but transcoding, which is a very
different workload.

FFmpeg is used by Youtube, Vimeo, ZenCoder, Transload-it and PandaStream
(where I'm working at) to transform the videos. Hardware encoders are great
for a specific target but FFmpeg just supports most the rubbish video formats
that customers like to throw at us.

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blibble
given that sites tend to only encode to a few formats, and given decoding is
cheap cpu wise: couldn't you pipe the output of the ffmpeg decoder into a
hardware encoder and get the best of both worlds?

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byoung2
When I worked at ClearChannel, it was the other way around...live feeds (e.g.
Rush Limbaugh's HD video feed) came out of a bank of MOTU livestream encoders
and was then fed through ffmpeg to be downsampled to web and mobile.

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hayksaakian
Interesting. Could something like this be used to live stream video?

Edit: at those rates, streaming to 1000 people for an hour would cost you 1800
dollars. I can't see that being worthwhile....

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zimbatm
It's not the same constraints.

With video transcoding you push batch jobs that can be processed at any time.
The video is taken from a S3 bucket and the result is put back in another
place. When transforming the video you might use some heuristics on the whole
file (because some formats have the metadata at the end). You can also
implement fallbacks when the transcoding fails.

With live streaming you need to acquire a streaming video source, transform it
in real-time and forward the stream without too much latency and without
failure. Then you need to push that stream to the N connected people possibly
fanning-out the traffic to multiple servers to dispatch the load.

