121–130 of 153 posts
Pricing 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.
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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…
MeGUI is hardly necessary - x264 has a good set of presets and tunes built in to begin with. --preset veryslow --tune film/animation/grain will already get you very far, beyond that pretty much the two most important things to possibly tweak are the strengths of AQ and psychovisual optimizations (--aq-strength and --psy-rd).
>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.
You might get away with an hour of almost-transparent content if it's not particularly bitrate-demanding, but two hours of live action will not look "indistinguishable from commercial Blu-ray discs". 5 Mbps High Profile L4.0 H.264 just won't look as good as ~30-40 Mbps H.264 High Profile L4.1 H.264 commonly found on BDs (unless the BD is really screwed up). At 720p you'd get pretty good results, though.
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…
Well well well, 2 weeks after Azure announces their transcoder, look what happens :)
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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
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>>>Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market Yes. But I don't recall reading anywhere that Amazon would or even could offer this. It makes me wonder what else there is they will sell. Warehousing software? Shipping logistics? Anyone have a list?
Amazon already offers warehousing and shipping as a service, even if you don't sell your products on Amazon: https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/180-311... You ship them a pallet of stuff, and then use a web API to ask items to be delivered to addresses.
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Not really. Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market. Remember, they're playing for the long-run. Maybe they needed it to convert their videos on LoveFilm.com or maybe another future service connected with their Cloud Drive. What is also means is that if your company provides a service to other developers you might well be in competition with…
>>>Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market Yes. But I don't recall reading anywhere that Amazon would or even could offer this. It makes me wonder what else there is they will sell. Warehousing software? Shipping logistics? Anyone have a list?
Amazon has offered streaming video for years now. This is just a guess on my part, but they probably don't receive video from studios in a stream-friendly format. Their streaming format has also likely been updated over the years.