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Amazon Elastic Transcoder

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Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#141

Post by alttab »

aysar wrote: post #71
brianbreslin wrote: post #67

Idea: build a pretty web based UI or software downloadable UI for this and mark up the costs to be just under zencoder's pricing. Would that be viable? for people who need 1 off transcoding they load up $20 of credits minimum or something. If someone wants to do it, I have a domain I've been sitting on which would be good for this.

Precisely what I was thinking... I'm probably going to jump on to this... do a 2-4 week hack at it and launch it. If anyone wants to partner, let me know (I can design and play full stack- either one). Let me know what the domain is, I may be interested.

Be careful. You are playing the price game. Long term winning strategies don't start with undercutting.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#142

Post by cloudshoring »

d33pika wrote: post #8
gklitt wrote: post #4

Does anyone with experience using Zencoder ( http://zencoder.com/en/ ) see advantages/disadvantages of this new Amazon service compared to Zencoder, which has been around for a while? Zencoder is owned by Brightcove and I'm sure they will be fully capable of putting up a good fight, but I can't imagine this won't take a significant amount of business away from them...

AWS only supports MP4, zencoder supports a whole host of them,significant being TS files for HTTP Live streaming needed by IOS devices.

I transcoded it in to FLV and it worked www.cloudshoring.in

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#144

Post by Dylan16807 »

gosub wrote: post #55
klinquist wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are ways around #1. It seems they could split a video up into enough chunks to make the bandwidth minimal for each party involved (it may not be worth it for /them/, however).

Or they could use homomorphic encryption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

Do you seriously think you can get any kind of reasonable compression using only operations that are data-independent?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#145

Post by ersii »

d33pika wrote: post #139
ersii wrote: post #136

Hm, I havn't used Amazons Web Services earlier - since most of their services looks to be priced in a good range, when suddenly you read the fine print about the bandwidth charges. I've been trying to read through about Amazon Elastic Transcoder (AET?)'s pricing - but I can't figure out the total. I assume you need to pay to get the video out of S3? Do you have to pay on the way in, as well? What would it cost to enc…

Data transfer in to S3 is free. First 1GB/month transfer out is free,after that it is 0.12GB for the next 10TB. These rates would apply if you store your video on S3 and use another service like zencoder too. The transfer between EC2 and S3 in same region is free though.

Ah, alrighty. Thanks!

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#146

Post by huhtenberg »

brownbat wrote: post #135
wpietri wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Trust is the biggest factor in a platform decision, and they'd be foolish to put all their other business at risk for a temporary advantage in one small slice. Especially since they are still making money on every Zencoder job.

> The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Is there a lot of that left since they knocked Netflix offline on Christmas eve?

Plenty left.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#147

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#148

Post by barkingcat »

mikecane wrote: post #36
zimbatm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is a strange question - Amazon can offer anything that can be thought of by the human mind and can be shown to make some money. It's a competitive world. I'd fully expect Amazon to do anything and everything their staff can come up with. Perhaps in a few years when the space industry takes off maybe even run a space / orbital freight service. It makes sense for them.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#149

Post by papsosouid »

doublec wrote: post #134
papsosouid wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome still supports MP4 as far as I know. They mentioned dropping support a couple of years ago but didn't. Firefox is getting MP4 support. Firefox OS and Firefox for Android on some devices has it already. Support on some versions of Windows is in nightly builds hidden behind a preference setting. Linux support is hidden behind a build switch. At some point when these backends are stable they'll be in normal build…

I thought chrome did drop it and microsoft released a plugin?

Firefox getting mp4 support doesn't change anything, people are already using firefox right now, and it doesn't support mp4 right now. The fact that the marketshare of non-mp4 firefox will eventually end up small enough that most people ignore it doesn't mean mp4 is all people need right now.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#150

Post by contingencies »

jfb wrote: post #58
contingencies wrote: post #54

As someone who worked until a couple of years ago in this field, I should point out that the larger area of value in the industry is the capacity to customize content for the consumer scenario (available bandwidth, CPU, resolution, available buffer size, CODEC support, etc.) and to do so automatically. The notion of precomputing various versions of a piece of media is not a new one, nor a particularly valuable one, s…

Only hard problems are worth solving. I for one find it a very interesting field to be working in.

I am glad to hear that you are interested in your work, as pleasure in work can be hard to find. Apologies for being in a philosophical mood: I contemplated not responding, and responding otherwise, but finally thought that offering this anecdote might be interesting. Please, take from it what you will.

A Buddhist I know said that the thing that troubled them about the digital media field was how it conflicted with their great respect for some of the ideas that are central to that philosophy. They said that they identified much modern media consumption as intoxication of the mind with what may amount to trivial experiences tangential to achieving happiness and peace, which they viewed as quite apart from the endless sensory experiences of the world. (For a simple example, they pointed to Youtube)

After some searching, this seems to be the reference: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma...

A [lay person] should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison.

Personally my friend's perspective did make me feel a little guilty about my work, since I am also (if sporadically) very interested in Buddhist philosophy and because encouraging people to spend their time "in earnest" (from a Buddhist perspective) is no doubt a personal failure as seen by the Buddhist teachings, in so far as I can grasp them myself. Yet, Buddhism also teaches that we should respect the treasure of conscience as a means to change our ways, and it is certainly true that communications of any kind can certainly be a bringer of good ... as well as thoughtless trivia.

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