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AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#11

Post by blibble »

zimbatm wrote: post #9
shortsightedsid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized software. Take a look at http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-and-S... . FFMPEG is great for personal use but unlikely to be used in production systems. 1. Its not "enterprisy". By that mean there is company behind the codecs who can provide supp…

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?

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#14

Post by wmf »

blibble wrote: post #11
zimbatm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#15

Post by byoung2 »

blibble wrote: post #11
zimbatm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#16

Post by byoung2 »

hayksaakian wrote: post #2

Interesting. Could something like this be used to live stream video? Edit: at those rates, streaming to 1000 people for an hour would cost you 1800 dollars. I can't see that being worthwhile....

Interesting. Could something like this be used to live stream video?

Amazon already offers live video streaming at a much lower price:

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#Does_Amazon_CloudFron...

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#17

Post by jfb »

shortsightedsid wrote: post #7
zimbatm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people underestimate the cost of handling FFmpeg and all it's particularities and the complexities inherent to each video format. Especially if you support "any" format on the input you quickly end up spending a lot of time dealing with heuristics (which evolve with each FFmpeg release). Development and learning time might be a bigger cost than the potential savings. The target format is also really important. W…

Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized software. Take a look at http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-and-S... . FFMPEG is great for personal use but unlikely to be used in production systems. 1. Its not "enterprisy". By that mean there is company behind the codecs who can provide supp…

Nobody uses ASIC hardware for off-line transcoding. There's no compelling reason, when you get much higher quality from software codecs.

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#18

Post by 13rules »

sp332 wrote: post #5

Unless I'm missing something, this is nothing that can't already be done by http://Zencoder.com

AWS is cheaper as terpua mentioned... but Zencoder has been awesome for us. Easy to set up and our video processes have been running with zero problems.
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