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.
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?
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.
You mean the worst of both worlds? Hardware encoders are both more expensive and less elastic; software can just run on the existing EC2 infrastructure.
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.