
Amazon Elastic Transcoder - chrisacky
https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/
======
chrisacky
It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market.

Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this
field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is _much
more cost effective_ (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale
and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes
worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of credits for HD video on
Zencoder).

If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember,
this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is
really the best case scenario for Zencoder.

If you are "just getting started", the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it's
$0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS.

I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There
are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all
just got sandbagged.

    
    
        [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing

~~~
jon_dahl
Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look
simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments.

1\. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already.

2\. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value.

We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known
about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _and we aren't worried._

So are you working on designing them out? Or are you counting on them never
giving your AWS account short shrift?

~~~
wpietri
I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short
shrift.

The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Trust is the
biggest factor in a platform decision, and they'd be foolish to put all their
other business at risk for a temporary advantage in one small slice.
Especially since they are still making money on every Zencoder job.

~~~
brownbat
> The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust.

Is there a lot of that left since they knocked Netflix offline on Christmas
eve?

~~~
huhtenberg
Plenty left.

------
Hupo
The thing that annoys me about both this and Zencoder is that for people who
are actually experienced with video encoding, there is absolutely no way to
tweak eg. the underlying x264 settings. There's quite a few settings that have
no effect on decoding in any way but are pretty important in getting the most
out of the video at a given bitrate (most notably the strength/mode of AQ and
psychovisual optimizations). In case of AWS, there doesn't even seem to be any
kind of "general" tuning (like whether the content is film, animation,
extremely grainy or so - x264 has --tune settings for these among others -
Zencoder at least allows you to access this option[1]) options available,
making it pretty much "one size fits all". I _could_ always rent a generic
server and use that for my encoding needs, but it'd be much more convenient if
these cloud transcoding services simply offered advanced configuration for
people who know what they are doing.

Also, even for a "simple" cloud transcoding service, Amazon's offering is
pretty limited in what it can do right now[2] - you can basically only encode
H.264 & AAC in MP4, define the profile, level and bitrate, and that's about
it. Zencoder has much more options in comparison and has generally more
transparency in regards to what their encoding software actually does (sadly
when I asked them about getting access to x264 settings directly, they replied
along the lines of "they could change and things might break for users!" -
which I don't think would be an actual issue since the direct settings ought
to be for advanced users only, and they should be aware of things changing -
plus Zencoder could just notify users of direct settings before they upgrade
so they have time to adjust their settings if necessary).

[1] <https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/h264/tuning>

[2]
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/develope...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/developerguide/preset-
settings.html)

~~~
jeffbarr
As is the case with every part of AWS, we add additional features and options
over time based on customer feedback and requests. Please feel free to let us
(or me -- jbarr@amazon.com) know what you need and I'll bring it to the team's
attention within 30 minutes.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
A really simple way to obtain very high quality per bit per second, given
prior knowledge of the nature of the material (film or not, grainy or not,
cartoon or not, etc) and the type of output desired (AVCHD, Blu-Ray, etc) is
to install MeGUI, then pick one of the community-built encoding profiles for
x264.

Choosing the right profile for the job is absolutely crucial. The combinations
of x264 parameters can be pretty arcane, and they sometimes change from one
x264 version to another. There's a pretty active community on forum.doom9.org
maintaining collections of profiles for MeGUI, some of those are excellent.

E.g., it is totally within the realm of possibility to put two hours of 1080p
content on a single-layer DVD (4.4GB), in a format compatible with any Blu-Ray
player out there (AVCHD, a subset of the Blu-Ray standard that accepts DVD as
the storage layer), while keeping video quality at a very high level -
basically indistinguishable from commercial Blu-Ray discs. But using a good
encoding profile, feeding the appropriate parameters to x264, is the single
most important factor in achieving that goal.

~~~
Hupo
>MeGUI profiles

MeGUI is hardly necessary - x264 has a good set of presets and tunes built in
to begin with. --preset veryslow --tune film/animation/grain will already get
you very far, beyond that pretty much the two most important things to
possibly tweak are the strengths of AQ and psychovisual optimizations (--aq-
strength and --psy-rd).

>it is totally within the realm of possibility to put two hours of 1080p
content on a single-layer DVD (4.4GB), in a format compatible with any Blu-Ray
player out there (AVCHD, a subset of the Blu-Ray standard that accepts DVD as
the storage layer), while keeping video quality at a very high level -
basically indistinguishable from commercial Blu-Ray discs.

You might get away with an hour of almost-transparent content if it's not
particularly bitrate-demanding, but two hours of live action will not look
"indistinguishable from commercial Blu-ray discs". 5 Mbps High Profile L4.0
H.264 just won't look as good as ~30-40 Mbps H.264 High Profile L4.1 H.264
commonly found on BDs (unless the BD is really screwed up). At 720p you'd get
pretty good results, though.

------
juddlyon
Zencoder has one of the nicest APIs I've ever used, it would take more than
price for me to switch.

~~~
gtaylor
While this makes me (as a developer) happy, my customers don't care. They want
encoding, they want it cheaper, and they want it better.

I am still tinkering, but for our purposes, it looks like Amazon's Transcoding
service is going to be cheaper and of good enough quality to get the nod over
Zencoder.

------
potta
While Amazon's service has a price advantage, there are some differences that
could justify Zencoder's premium for some customers.

Amazon gives you a maximum of 4 encoding pipelines. These operate like queues.
If you are processing many jobs simultaneously, and encoding multiple versions
of each video, then those queues could start to build up. With Zencoder, all
your jobs are processed in parallel, no matter how much you throw at it. In my
experience, queue times with Zencoder have averaged <10 seconds.

For batch jobs, that aren't sensitive to encoding times Amazon's queues
shouldn't be a problem (ex - a media company encoding a huge library into a
bunch of different formats). Business video services or online video platforms
may want to optimize around keeping queue times low to get client videos out
quickly.

Zencoder also seems to be working on premium services like closed captioning
(an FCC rule says that programming that is shown on TV must have closed
captioning when it is shown on the web), live streaming, and packaging HLS
streams. Finally, Zencoder supports formats like ProRes 422, that Amazon may
not (I haven't seen a list of input formats yet). Zencoder also has great
support and a great API.

I'm a Zencoder customer and don't have any vested interest in the company. In
fact, I'll be taking a look at the service to see if it meets our needs. I
just wanted to highlight that if you are making a decision around transcoding,
you need to define your requirements, understand the trade offs, and test the
different options.

------
gklitt
Does anyone with experience using Zencoder (<http://zencoder.com/en/>) see
advantages/disadvantages of this new Amazon service compared to Zencoder,
which has been around for a while? Zencoder is owned by Brightcove and I'm
sure they will be fully capable of putting up a good fight, but I can't
imagine this won't take a significant amount of business away from them...

~~~
d33pika
I am also curious about the how fast the AWS service will be. Zencoder is
pretty fast. [http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-
benchmarked-2x-...](http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-
benchmarked-2x-10x-faster-than-the-competition/)

~~~
lusr
I was under the impression Zencoder already runs on the AWS infrastructure:

* <https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/zencoder>

* [http://gigaom.com/2011/04/12/zencoder-raises-2m-for-cloud-ba...](http://gigaom.com/2011/04/12/zencoder-raises-2m-for-cloud-based-video-encoding/)

~~~
d33pika
Yes, they do,they use the cluster compute
instances:[http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-
com...](http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-compute-
engine-for-video-transcoding/) I doubt if amazon is going to use them.

------
contingencies
As someone who worked until a couple of years ago in this field, I should
point out that the larger area of value in the industry is the capacity to
customize content for the consumer scenario (available bandwidth, CPU,
resolution, available buffer size, CODEC support, etc.) and to do so
automatically.

The notion of precomputing various versions of a piece of media is not a new
one, nor a particularly valuable one, since consumers rarely know which option
to select.

What users really need is something that perfectly matches their viewing
scenario and their device (largely mobile). The knowledge of what works well
on each device (with default settings) is the real gem here, and the capacity
to deliver it ASAP (eg. transcoding in real time) is the service to supply.

There are far more codec options than you can shake a stick at, and they do
affect playback quality - especially during higher and lower bitrate portions
of the media, and especially on lower end mobile devices (essentially today's
global internet access norm).

While the standard tool in this area is ffmpeg, one should note that not all
of its algorithms can be parallelized, so real time delivery is a thornier
problem than you might expect. Also, while there are device databases that can
tell you resolution from an _HTTP User Agent_ string, none of these will tell
you CODEC support and functional bitrate limitations. The manufacturers,
hastily throwing together devices from third party chip SDKs, often don't know
these specs themselves.

Throw in subtitle stream rendering support and the corresponding font
problems, and things get really fun really quickly.

Good luck to anyone in this area, I for one am glad to have left!

~~~
jfb
Only hard problems are worth solving. I for one find it a very interesting
field to be working in.

~~~
contingencies
I am glad to hear that you are interested in your work, as pleasure in work
can be hard to find. Apologies for being in a philosophical mood: I
contemplated not responding, and responding otherwise, but finally thought
that offering this anecdote might be interesting. Please, take from it what
you will.

A Buddhist I know said that the thing that troubled them about the digital
media field was how it conflicted with their great respect for some of the
ideas that are central to that philosophy. They said that they identified much
modern media consumption as intoxication of the mind with what may amount to
trivial experiences tangential to achieving happiness and peace, which they
viewed as quite apart from the endless sensory experiences of the world. (For
a simple example, they pointed to Youtube)

After some searching, this seems to be the reference:
[http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma...](http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-
ajivo/index.html)

 _A [lay person] should not engage in five types of business. Which five?
Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in
intoxicants, and business in poison._

Personally my friend's perspective did make me feel a little guilty about my
work, since I am also (if sporadically) very interested in Buddhist philosophy
and because encouraging people to spend their time "in earnest" (from a
Buddhist perspective) is no doubt a personal failure as seen by the Buddhist
teachings, in so far as I can grasp them myself. Yet, Buddhism also teaches
that we should respect the _treasure of conscience_ as a means to change our
ways, and it is certainly true that communications of any kind can certainly
be a bringer of good ... as well as thoughtless trivia.

~~~
jfb
A good, thoughtful post. Cheers for it.

------
jeffbarr
Here's my blog post with some additional info:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-
transcoder...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-
transcoder.html)

------
roel_v
Only h264/AAC/mp4 output though. I wonder how well they handle embedded
subtitle streams, too (I don't even know if they're supported at all for mp4).
Seems OK for the most basic of web video streaming, but then again, I guess
that's the majority of the use cases they're targeting. (more concretely, this
doesn't look to be suitable for digitizing dvd collections).

------
steeve
Well well well, 2 weeks after Azure announces their transcoder, look what
happens :)

~~~
mmastrac
There's no way that Amazon heard Azure's announcement and shipped this within
two weeks from scratch.

~~~
joshmlewis
Everyone look at this guy! He's got logic!

~~~
joshmlewis
I'm sorry for the above comment everyone. Reddit has infected my humor. I
shouldn't have brought it here. :(

------
neotek
How about audio transcoding? At my music startup we're building a transcoding
backend that will take in FLAC, AIFF, or WAV and spit out MP3, FLAC, AAC,
ALAC, and OGG files for people to download, and I'd kill for a transcoding
service with a robust API that can deliver those formts.

~~~
cwh
build it

~~~
nmcfarl
No need to build it - Zencoder already does it.

\--

Edit: looks like they only support these audio codecs: aac, ac3, amr, eac3,
mp3, vorbis, and wma

[https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-
codecs...](https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-codecs/audio-
codec)

~~~
jon_dahl
We've thought hard about Opus, FLAC, and ALAC. Don't be surprised if you see
those soon...

------
borplk
Damn pretty smart move.

They place themselves in the 'lowest common denominator' of the industry.

Whilst the smaller companies and startups compete and struggle to find the
right combination of factors for their awesome video/web/cloud/storage/etc
product at the end of the day they all need the same kind of thing to operate
on and Amazon is often the cheapest option to start with and it serves the
whole industry making little cents tick tick tick one after another...

------
hayksaakian
Interesting. Are there any consumer facing apps using these services (aws
transcode competitors/zencoder)?

Could this be used to stream live video?

~~~
d33pika
Zencoder recently came out with live transcoding. Its only a transcoding
service, but I guess using brightcove you can stream live videos. AWS has only
announced file base transcoding.

------
WordSkill
Amazon should complement this new transcoding service and their existing media
streaming (via Cloudfront) with a full media server, along the lines of Red5
or Wowza or Adobe Media Server, that would allow you to do more advanced
stuff, such as capturing video from users, hosting video chatrooms etc.

You can already run Wowza instances on EC2 but the premium on top of standard
AWS prices is too high, if this functionality can be commoditized there will
be an explosion of innovative new uses.

~~~
gtCameron
I agree. We have been trying to scale our Wowza on EC2 setup for live video
streaming, but after looking at our options it was about the same price to
just go with a VDN like Edgecast that managed the server complexity for us.

If Amazon could support live streaming through Cloudfront I think they could
undercut the existing VDNs on pricing and have a big opportunity in that
market.

------
justincormack
Ah yes. Remember if you run services that compete with what Amazon might do
you may have a problem. There are many businesses in this space running on
AWS.

------
brianbreslin
Idea: build a pretty web based UI or software downloadable UI for this and
mark up the costs to be just under zencoder's pricing. Would that be viable?
for people who need 1 off transcoding they load up $20 of credits minimum or
something.

If someone wants to do it, I have a domain I've been sitting on which would be
good for this.

~~~
aysar
Precisely what I was thinking... I'm probably going to jump on to this... do a
2-4 week hack at it and launch it. If anyone wants to partner, let me know (I
can design and play full stack- either one).

Let me know what the domain is, I may be interested.

~~~
alttab
Be careful. You are playing the price game. Long term winning strategies don't
start with undercutting.

------
Tekker
The Porn industry just took a huge step forward. :)

~~~
level09
Amazon doesn't allow porn content on its servers ..

~~~
true_religion
I just checked their AUP, and it doesn't seem to say that [1]. This makes
sense since AWS is pretty much a content agnostic system that you pay for by
the hour and otherwise have no interaction with amazon staff.

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/aup/>

------
yoda_sl
It will not be surprising that in fact Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in fact
what Netflix with Amazon's help may have work on in the past few years.
Netflix is well known to use Amazon web services not only for the streaming
part but even for doing all the movies encoding for all different devices they
need to support. So I will not be surprise that it has now become a mature
project that Amazon is now opening up, similar to the other service for S3
where you can ship your hard drive to upload directly on S3 without wasting
bandwidth: from what I recall that service was in fact created initially for
Netflix but later on open to third party.

------
edgesrazor
We're using Encoding.com right now which works off the AWS infrastructure. We
pre-paid and got our pricing down to $0.018 per megabyte. The drawback to this
method is that encoding charges you for MB in AND MB out, whereas Amazon and
Zencoder are charging just by the minute of output.

I'm pretty happy with Encoding.com but after running some test files through
AWS, I have to seriously consider switching - AWS seems much faster (not a
controlled test, more is needed) and in our case it's much easier to predict
costs by going with a per minute model than a per MB in/out. An added bonus -
boto already has support for it.

~~~
edgesrazor
EDIT: I made one of my typical decimal blunders - we are paying $0.0018 per
megabyte. Big difference.

------
ersii
Hm, I havn't used Amazons Web Services earlier - since most of their services
looks to be priced in a good range, when suddenly you read the fine print
about the bandwidth charges.

I've been trying to read through about Amazon Elastic Transcoder (AET?)'s
pricing - but I can't figure out the total. I assume you need to pay to get
the video out of S3? Do you have to pay on the way in, as well?

What would it cost to encode a 20 minute HD video that's like, 500MB?

~~~
d33pika
Data transfer in to S3 is free. First 1GB/month transfer out is free,after
that it is 0.12GB for the next 10TB. These rates would apply if you store your
video on S3 and use another service like zencoder too. The transfer between
EC2 and S3 in same region is free though.

~~~
ersii
Ah, alrighty. Thanks!

------
pdknsk
Why is the pricing tier so static?

    
    
      $0,030:
      1920 x 1080 @ 62500 kbps  
      ...  
      1280 x  720 @ 17500 kbps

------
ireland
I'm sorry to say this but doesn't this mean the end for Zencoder, TransLoadIT
and other video encoding services?

~~~
hisyam
Using that logic, all the other cloud storage services would be out of
business right now.

------
mikey_p
Am I reading this right, in that there is no support for WebM/VP8? If so, I'm
a bit confused as to who this product is supposed to be for, it seems not
suitable for generic web video. Is this intended to be for mobile only?

------
dagge
Wow, that product page is just massive. It tires me so much just looking at it
that I'd rather just browse along. I'd like to see what designers looking to
build up their portfolio could do with the Amazon AWS products.

~~~
wpietri
I think the problem may be your lack of interest. As somebody who has used AWS
a fair bit, I love those massive pages. It's easy for me to jump around, and
being able to use in-browser search to rummage through the whole thing is
great.

------
brown9-2
Pricing this per-video-minute seems pretty smart (not familiar with the space
so I'm not sure if this is how it is generally done).

As their CPUs get faster, they can transcode the same video for the same price
for less cost to Amazon.

~~~
jmartens
Pretty standard way to price....Zencoder pioneered it a few years ago.

------
klinquist
Why haven't they started pushing these jobs down to distributed clients? I'd
love to run an Amazon Transcoding app on my PC and earn credit that I can
spend toward other Amazon services.

~~~
EricBurnett
1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that.
2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd
provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.

~~~
klinquist
Well, there are ways around #1. It seems they could split a video up into
enough chunks to make the bandwidth minimal for each party involved (it may
not be worth it for /them/, however).

~~~
gosub
Or they could use homomorphic encryption.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption>

~~~
Dylan16807
Do you seriously think you can get _any_ kind of reasonable compression using
only operations that are data-independent?

------
jmartens
The most interesting part of this move is what it says about their relations
with EC2 customers. Most cloud encoders that ET will compte with, run on EC2.

------
ericcholis
I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix assisted in this.

------
shn
Could this be a trend for Amazon that they'll expand vertically? If that is
the case they'll be competing with their customers eventually.

------
dangravell
Who's the market? Surely crappy upload speeds and download caps stop this
being used by 'consumers'.

------
ketralnis
Wow, they really are tailoring their service for Netflix specifically these
days.

~~~
jmartens
no way Netflix would use this service...they'll stick with EC2 and do their
own encoding.

------
jmartens
great news for customers....

------
garrynewman
I love aws

