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Amazon Elastic Transcoder

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Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#111

Post by igravious »

untog wrote: post #104
18pfsmt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Amazon would buy Salesforce, or that Amazon would buy Heroku from Salesforce?

I actually forgot that Heroku had been bought out by Salesforce- but the point remains that before they sold, Amazon could have been tried competing in any buy out. I can't quite believe Amazon has never acquired anyone, though- are there any high profile ones out there?

eh? From the bottom of the Amazon.com homepage ...

---

AbeBooks

AfterSchool.com

Audible

BeautyBar.com

Book Depository

Bookworm.com

Casa.com

CreateSpace

Diapers.com

DPReview

Fabric

IMDb

Junglee.com

MYHABIT

Shopbop

Soap.com

Vine.com

Wag.com

Woot

Yoyo.com

Zappos

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#112

Post by papsosouid »

jeffbarr wrote: post #94
Hupo wrote: post #90

The 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…

As is the case with every part of AWS, we add additional features and options over time based on customer feedback and requests. Please feel free to let us (or me -- jbarr@amazon.com) know what you need and I'll bring it to the team's attention within 30 minutes.

There has to be webm output support, firefox and chrome don't support mp4. And as always, it would really be helpful if s3 supported notifications, so you could automatically put a message into SQS or add a job to this new transcoding service when a file is uploaded to a bucket.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#113

Post by shalmanese »

untog wrote: post #92
jpdoctor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target. I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.

Amazon bought Zappos and Kiva

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#114

Post by joshmlewis »

joshmlewis wrote: post #53
mmastrac wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way that Amazon heard Azure's announcement and shipped this within two weeks from scratch.

Everyone look at this guy! He's got logic!

I'm sorry for the above comment everyone. Reddit has infected my humor. I shouldn't have brought it here. :(

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#115

Post by Florin_Andrei »

jeffbarr wrote: post #94
Hupo wrote: post #90

The 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…

As is the case with every part of AWS, we add additional features and options over time based on customer feedback and requests. Please feel free to let us (or me -- jbarr@amazon.com) know what you need and I'll bring it to the team's attention within 30 minutes.

A really simple way to obtain very high quality per bit per second, given prior knowledge of the nature of the material (film or not, grainy or not, cartoon or not, etc) and the type of output desired (AVCHD, Blu-Ray, etc) is to install MeGUI, then pick one of the community-built encoding profiles for x264.

Choosing the right profile for the job is absolutely crucial. The combinations of x264 parameters can be pretty arcane, and they sometimes change from one x264 version to another. There's a pretty active community on forum.doom9.org maintaining collections of profiles for MeGUI, some of those are excellent.

E.g., it is totally within the realm of possibility to put two hours of 1080p content on a single-layer DVD (4.4GB), in a format compatible with any Blu-Ray player out there (AVCHD, a subset of the Blu-Ray standard that accepts DVD as the storage layer), while keeping video quality at a very high level - basically indistinguishable from commercial Blu-Ray discs. But using a good encoding profile, feeding the appropriate parameters to x264, is the single most important factor in achieving that goal.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#118

Post by jmartens »

jon_dahl wrote: post #91
chrisacky wrote: post #7

It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market. Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is much more cost effective (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of…

Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments. 1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already. 2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value. We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.

Jon- How does this effect your relationship with EC2?
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