Ask HN: How do you deal with encoding HTML5 videos?

#1

Post by cvalleskey » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 3:31 PM UTC

I'm working on an iOS app that lets you record video and share it with friends. The videos are currently encoded as MP4 files, which means they play in Chrome and Safari. However, this leaves us with the issue of them not playing in Firefox or other browsers which don't support MP4.

My question is this: How do you deal with this problem? Do you re-encode the videos on the server into a format that works in Firefox/other browsers? Or is there a better way to get more support without having multiple copies of each video?

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with encoding HTML5 videos?

#2

Post by NicoJuicy » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 3:42 PM UTC

Actually, i use Azure Media Streaming services.. (i'm BizSpark), but i suppose AWS has the same services, you just need to include a link, and the service will automaticly encode it into the correct format (don't specify the filetype).

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/

https://aws.amazon.com/digital-media/

https://www.google.be/search?q=encode+media+&oq=encode+media...

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with encoding HTML5 videos?

#3

Post by mobitar » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #2

Actually, i use Azure Media Streaming services.. (i'm BizSpark), but i suppose AWS has the same services, you just need to include a link, and the service will automaticly encode it into the correct format (don't specify the filetype). http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/ https://aws.amazon.com/digital-media/ https://www.google.be/search?q=encode+media+&oq=encode+media...

Amazon does have an Amazon Elastic Transcoder, but it is rather pricey.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with encoding HTML5 videos?

#4

Post by jason_slack » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 9:42 PM UTC

I use Handbrake and I also wrote a bash script that uses ffMpeg and ffMpeg2Theora and some other items to produce mp4, webm, ogv and flv fallback.