An interesting thing to look into might be using the (apparently Kepler) NVENC capabilities present on EC2 G2 instances. For $2.60 an hour, you get 4x Kepler G

An interesting thing to look into might be using the (apparently Kepler) NVENC capabilities present on EC2 G2 instances. For $2.60 an hour, you get 4x Kepler GPUs that can handle ~4x realtime 1080p encodes each (120fps per GPU), or 16x realtime 1080p encodes total (480fps). To convert this into rather odd units, that works out to ~1.37Tpix/$ (1920x1080 x 480fps x 3600s / $2.6). Put this on reserved instances and that number is pushed up to ~2.2Tpix/$. According to [1], ffmpeg + x264 performance on the most cost effective instances (c3.xlarge) was 20s for a 30s, 960x540 video, or roughly 0.5Mpix at 45fps. That's 83Gpix for $0.21, or 0.399Tpix/$ at spot prices or 0.672Tpix/$ at reserved prices. Depending on how much you care about your compression quality (NVENC isn't quite as good as x264 veryslow but it's definitely usable, particularly with its "two pass" preset), it might be worth a good look at the GPU encoders. [1]: https://github.com/sportarchive/CloudTranscode/blob/master/benchmark/benchmark-aws-ffmpeg.xlsx https://github.com/sportarchive/CloudTranscode/blob/master/b...