How to encode all of your videos on the cloud, quickly and cheaply • Hacker News Board

Re: How to encode all of your videos on the cloud, quickly and cheaply

#11

Post by kelkabany » Fri, Jul 23, 2010, 10:41 AM UTC

Maskawanian wrote: post #10

@kelkabany I find this interesting, but two questions. 1. Would you be able to provide a downloadable working copy of the python source? 2. Picloud seems to be limited to 5GB files, most video files that one would transcode are larger than that. Is there a way around this?

1. If you piece the code snippets together in the post, it'll work. Nevertheless, I'll be posting a downloadable source file soon.

2. Our cloud.files module does have a 5GB file size limit. However, you are free to store your data elsewhere (probably on EC2 for fast and free data transfer), and access it using PiCloud. For example, you could store the video files on your own CouchDB server running on EC2, and simply query the server in your code (using the python-couchdb module) for the video.

Re: How to encode all of your videos on the cloud, quickly and cheaply

#12

Post by kierank » Fri, Jul 23, 2010, 11:30 AM UTC

dboyd wrote: post #4

There doesn't seem to be any information about patent indemnification. I've done video transcoding in the past. While I wasn't an expert on the legal/patent issues, I know that the product we used (helix mobile producer, from Real) indemnified us such that we could then use ffmpeg as long as it was on the same machine. If you use this service, you might want to inquire into patent issues, and if you are covered.

There doesn't seem to be any information about patent indemnification.

You could say that about any blog post about any piece of software. Just because there's been a lot of (rather emotionally driven) press recently about video patents doesn't make it any different.

Re: How to encode all of your videos on the cloud, quickly and cheaply

#13

Post by kierank » Fri, Jul 23, 2010, 11:34 AM UTC

They've chosen the worst video formats to use. H.264 encoding with libx264 would outclass anything ffmpeg's FLV encoder and MPEG-4 ASP encoder could produce. N.B: The FLV container does not require the use of the FLV video codec.

Re: How to encode all of your videos on the cloud, quickly and cheaply

#14

Post by jon_dahl » Fri, Jul 23, 2010, 3:17 PM UTC

bgentry wrote: post #7

How many of these "running FFMPEG yourself is so much cheaper than XX service! XX is a ripoff" posts are we going to see? If you pay for a good transcoding service, you're not just paying for being able to run FFMPEG. That's the easy part. The hard part is dealing with thousands of combinations of audio and video codecs, containers, pixel and display aspect ratios, handling improperly encoded files and optimizing to…

First, PiCloud looks really interesting and extremely useful. It's solving a different problem than Zencoder - we operate on different levels. (We've actually talked to the PiCloud folks in the past about working together.)

Just to give a little detail on the video front: if you only run ffmpeg, you're guaranteed not to support a few dozen edge cases. You'll run into a non-trivial number of codec incompatibilities (>1% at a typical UGC site), audio/video sync issues, aspect ratio distortion, edge case bugs, etc. You also won't get the best output quality or compression, and you won't be able to do certain "advanced" features (like auto-rotate rotated videos).

That's not to say that ffmpeg is a bad tool. It's a great tool, and an incredible open-source project. But using it (well) isn't easy. At Zencoder, we use ffmpeg alongside a dozen other tools, both open-source and commercial. More importantly, we "drive" those tools with a lot of custom logic - to date, we have about 50 fixes and improvements over vanilla transcoding tools.