

Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding - daniel_levine
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/yc-funded-zencoder-wants-to-be-the-amazon-web-services-of-video-encoding/

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PanMan
While I love cloud services like these, I always wonder about it for the high-
end accounts. With pricing at $3.60/hour of encoded video, it seems building
your own render server seems to pay out fairly soon.

For <http://OneFrameOfFame.com> I was looking for a video encoding service
that would take a bunch of images & sound file as input, and would encode it
to a video file. Since none of the cloud video encoding parties I looked at
(Encoding.com, Heywatch, ankoder) offered this, I ended up renting a linode
VPS and encoding myself with ffmpeg. Which turned out to be not that hard. If
you need the management tools, there are packages like
<http://pandastream.org/>

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jon_dahl
Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of
video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can
offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty
strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a
service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're
biased, of course. :)

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cmp
I'm hooked. Where's the Python api?

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jon_dahl
The API is just http + json, so it works with any language. But we also hope
to have an open source Python integration library very soon. (Anyone want to
help us with that?) :)

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acangiano
This interests me for ThinkCode.TV. We tried half a dozen companies and were
overall disappointed with their results. (Ogg Theora in particular was
challenging for most.)

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zach
This is great. I've had clients years ago want to offer video sharing on their
site and I basically have to tell them it's a major project so they might as
well have their users upload it to YouTube instead. This is exactly the kind
of service that makes video UGC possible, even easy.

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Judson
I long for the day when a really fast internet connection + Zencoder can
replace my Handbrake setup.

Probably not Zencoder's premier market though...

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rlpb
What are the output codecs and container formats? Is it just me or is this
information conspicuously missing?

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jon_dahl
Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and
play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do:

Input: just about everything

Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Flash 9+ container
format. Ogg/vorbis/theora are coming soon, as are a few others that we can't
talk about yet. We've decided to take the "narrow" approach for now - 99% of
the demand that we see is for these five codecs (H.264, AAC, MP3, Theora,
Vorbis). If there's anything in particular that you're looking for, let us
know.

~~~
PanMan
Do you do the slicing, multiple bitrates & playlists that are needed to play
streaming video to i(Phone|Pad) devices?

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jon_dahl
Soon! It's in the works. In the meantime, we can of course do non-streaming
video for iPad/iPhone/etc. (Email us if you're interested in early access to
iPhone streaming.)

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PanMan
The problem with the non-streaming is that Apple doesn't approve apps anymore
that do non-streaming over 3G (for over 5 min/10 MB video's). Will email you
if I need it tho!

Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file,
and render it to a movie?

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jon_dahl
_Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack
file, and render it to a movie?_

Not at the moment. It's something we're considering at some point, though.

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blantonl
How are they provisioning and managing infrastructure resources? Are they
using AWS/EC2 on their back end?

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jon_dahl
Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can
support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own
servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many
people use S3 for video storage and delivery, and (2) Amazon's fastest servers
(XL High CPU) are pretty fast - faster than most cloud servers.

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callmeed
I recall Zencoder had promo material out at Railsconf last year. I'm curious
what's changed or why they've become a YC company.

~~~
brandonarbini
At that time we had just released Flix Cloud. We have spent the last year
supporting that product and learning from our customers. This release of
Zencoder is the result.

As for the last question: when you're offered a spot in YC, you don't turn it
down!

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mickeyben
I personally use HeyWatch, for less volume the price is way cheaper. It's
0.05e/video, you double the price if you need HD.

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fizzfur
So is zencoder _only_ for h264 encoding? Site didn't make the output formats
very clear.

