Zencoder has one of the nicest APIs I've ever used, it would take more than price for me to switch.
This needs more upvotes so it remains visible to all the people in at the top of the discussion who think Zencoder lives and dies on price alone.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#82Why 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.
The cost and time of pushing them out over the public internet rather than as internal network traffic, for one.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. Yep, they put a potential competitor into their critical path. The business lesson is: Don't do that. Nothin personal, jus business.
A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?
> but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service?
Anyone who has used their instant streaming service. They have a boatload of video to transcode to zillions of devices. The fact that they would take that in-house was not a particularly big leap.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. Yep, they put a potential competitor into their critical path. The business lesson is: Don't do that. Nothin personal, jus business.
A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?
I'd expect anything that allows them to sell more instances without having to increase cost of sales. They have unique edge in being able to see what types of services would do well under this model, including live competitive analysis on the instances they currently run.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?
If you'd asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have expected Amazon to provide a CDN. Or a DNS server. Or a giant MySQL instance in the sky. I think the general lesson here is that if it is a server-based operation that can be made more cost effective in bulk, Amazon are interested in doing it.
> that can be made more cost effective in bulk
I assume the Heroku guys have noticed by now. Hopefully they're working on designing Amazon out.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#86How 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.
Check out http://transloadit.com
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#87I'm sorry to say this but doesn't this mean the end for Zencoder, TransLoadIT and other video encoding services?
Transloadit doesn't do video only, it does much more.
Not sure about Zencoder and Pandastream.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#88Pricing 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.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
build it
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...
We've thought hard about Opus, FLAC, and ALAC. Don't be surprised if you see those soon...
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#90The 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...