5 ms·

Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

80 points by daniel_levine 16y ago

blantonl 16y ago
How are they provisioning and managing infrastructure resources? Are they using AWS/EC2 on their back end?
- jon_dahl 16y ago
  Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many people use S3 for video storage and delivery, and (2) Amazon's fastest servers (XL High CPU) are pretty fast - faster than most cloud servers.
rlpb 16y ago
What are the output codecs and container formats? Is it just me or is this information conspicuously missing?
- jon_dahl 16y ago
  Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do: Input: just about everything Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Flash 9+ container format. Ogg/vorbis/theora are coming soon, as are a few others that we can't talk about yet. We've decided to take the "narrow" approach for now - 99% of the demand that we see is for these five codecs (H.264, AAC, MP3, Theora, Vorbis). If there's anything in particular that you're looking for, let us know.
  - samwillis 16y ago
    "... a few others that we can't talk about yet." With the On2/Google link this sounds like VP8.
  - PanMan 16y ago
    Do you do the slicing, multiple bitrates & playlists that are needed to play streaming video to i(Phone|Pad) devices?
    - jon_dahl 16y ago
      Soon! It's in the works. In the meantime, we can of course do non-streaming video for iPad/iPhone/etc. (Email us if you're interested in early access to iPhone streaming.)
      - PanMan 16y ago
        The problem with the non-streaming is that Apple doesn't approve apps anymore that do non-streaming over 3G (for over 5 min/10 MB video's). Will email you if I need it tho! Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file, and render it to a movie?
        jon_dahl 16y ago
        Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file, and render it to a movie? Not at the moment. It's something we're considering at some point, though.
- ptomato 16y ago
  http://zencoder.com/docs/encoding/#output-formats http://zencoder.com/docs/encoding/#output-formats
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
zach 16y ago
This is great. I've had clients years ago want to offer video sharing on their site and I basically have to tell them it's a major project so they might as well have their users upload it to YouTube instead. This is exactly the kind of service that makes video UGC possible, even easy.
acangiano 16y ago
This interests me for ThinkCode.TV. We tried half a dozen companies and were overall disappointed with their results. (Ogg Theora in particular was challenging for most.)
PanMan 16y ago
While I love cloud services like these, I always wonder about it for the high-end accounts. With pricing at $3.60/hour of encoded video, it seems building your own render server seems to pay out fairly soon. For http://OneFrameOfFame.com http://OneFrameOfFame.com I was looking for a video encoding service that would take a bunch of images & sound file as input, and would encode it to a video file. Since none of the cloud video encoding parties I looked at (Encoding.com, Heywatch, ankoder) offered this, I ended up renting a linode VPS and encoding myself with ffmpeg. Which turned out to be not that hard. If you need the management tools, there are packages like http://pandastream.org/ http://pandastream.org/
- dotBen 16y ago
  I agree. Also the industries that have large volumes of video to be encoded, who can afford that rate, are ones like "adult" -- and I believe Zencoder won't touch adult video conversion. I know they have their reasons, and I respect them, but I do think it is a mistake and a limitation.
- jon_dahl 16y ago
  Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. :)
  - Terretta 16y ago
    > We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. Speaking as a company that reluctantly made a decision to offer this for our customers when we couldn't find (a few years ago) an affordable volume solution to outsource, I agree with you completely. Given the rate of change and state of tools, running even an in-house encoding solution is likely to be a much bigger undertaking than expected. In-house IT staff would need to understand distributed computing, dynamic load based provisioning, web services software development, and somehow, blended with that, the black art of producing good looking video at low bitrates using minimal CPU time. Any one of these areas is a full discipline on its own. If I understand correctly, Posterous got funding, and is pushing this part out the door to Zencoder. That's a smart decision. Focus on what you do. The video industry needs more Zencoders and fewer people trying to do it in house. There are still far more backlogs of unencoded video than there are movies online.
callmeed 16y ago
I recall Zencoder had promo material out at Railsconf last year. I'm curious what's changed or why they've become a YC company.
- brandonarbini 16y ago
  At that time we had just released Flix Cloud. We have spent the last year supporting that product and learning from our customers. This release of Zencoder is the result. As for the last question: when you're offered a spot in YC, you don't turn it down!
Judson 16y ago
I long for the day when a really fast internet connection + Zencoder can replace my Handbrake setup. Probably not Zencoder's premier market though...
mickeyben 16y ago
I personally use HeyWatch, for less volume the price is way cheaper. It's 0.05e/video, you double the price if you need HD.
fizzfur 16y ago
So is zencoder _only_ for h264 encoding? Site didn't make the output formats very clear.

80 points by daniel_levine 16y ago

blantonl 16y ago

How are they provisioning and managing infrastructure resources? Are they using AWS/EC2 on their back end?

jon_dahl 16y ago
Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many people use S3 for video storage and delivery, and (2) Amazon's fastest servers (XL High CPU) are pretty fast - faster than most cloud servers.

rlpb 16y ago

What are the output codecs and container formats? Is it just me or is this information conspicuously missing?

jon_dahl 16y ago
Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do: Input: just about everything Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Flash 9+ container format. Ogg/vorbis/theora are coming soon, as are a few others that we can't talk about yet. We've decided to take the "narrow" approach for now - 99% of the demand that we see is for these five codecs (H.264, AAC, MP3, Theora, Vorbis). If there's anything in particular that you're looking for, let us know.
- samwillis 16y ago
  "... a few others that we can't talk about yet." With the On2/Google link this sounds like VP8.
- PanMan 16y ago
  Do you do the slicing, multiple bitrates & playlists that are needed to play streaming video to i(Phone|Pad) devices?
  - jon_dahl 16y ago
    Soon! It's in the works. In the meantime, we can of course do non-streaming video for iPad/iPhone/etc. (Email us if you're interested in early access to iPhone streaming.)
    - PanMan 16y ago
      The problem with the non-streaming is that Apple doesn't approve apps anymore that do non-streaming over 3G (for over 5 min/10 MB video's). Will email you if I need it tho! Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file, and render it to a movie?
      - jon_dahl 16y ago
        Oh, and then a harder one: Could you take a bunch of images & soundtrack file, and render it to a movie? Not at the moment. It's something we're considering at some point, though.
ptomato 16y ago
http://zencoder.com/docs/encoding/#output-formats http://zencoder.com/docs/encoding/#output-formats

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

zach 16y ago

This is great. I've had clients years ago want to offer video sharing on their site and I basically have to tell them it's a major project so they might as well have their users upload it to YouTube instead. This is exactly the kind of service that makes video UGC possible, even easy.

acangiano 16y ago

This interests me for ThinkCode.TV. We tried half a dozen companies and were overall disappointed with their results. (Ogg Theora in particular was challenging for most.)

PanMan 16y ago

While I love cloud services like these, I always wonder about it for the high-end accounts. With pricing at $3.60/hour of encoded video, it seems building your own render server seems to pay out fairly soon. For http://OneFrameOfFame.com http://OneFrameOfFame.com I was looking for a video encoding service that would take a bunch of images & sound file as input, and would encode it to a video file. Since none of the cloud video encoding parties I looked at (Encoding.com, Heywatch, ankoder) offered this, I ended up renting a linode VPS and encoding myself with ffmpeg. Which turned out to be not that hard. If you need the management tools, there are packages like http://pandastream.org/ http://pandastream.org/

dotBen 16y ago
I agree. Also the industries that have large volumes of video to be encoded, who can afford that rate, are ones like "adult" -- and I believe Zencoder won't touch adult video conversion. I know they have their reasons, and I respect them, but I do think it is a mistake and a limitation.
jon_dahl 16y ago
Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. :)
- Terretta 16y ago
  > We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. Speaking as a company that reluctantly made a decision to offer this for our customers when we couldn't find (a few years ago) an affordable volume solution to outsource, I agree with you completely. Given the rate of change and state of tools, running even an in-house encoding solution is likely to be a much bigger undertaking than expected. In-house IT staff would need to understand distributed computing, dynamic load based provisioning, web services software development, and somehow, blended with that, the black art of producing good looking video at low bitrates using minimal CPU time. Any one of these areas is a full discipline on its own. If I understand correctly, Posterous got funding, and is pushing this part out the door to Zencoder. That's a smart decision. Focus on what you do. The video industry needs more Zencoders and fewer people trying to do it in house. There are still far more backlogs of unencoded video than there are movies online.

callmeed 16y ago

I recall Zencoder had promo material out at Railsconf last year. I'm curious what's changed or why they've become a YC company.

brandonarbini 16y ago
At that time we had just released Flix Cloud. We have spent the last year supporting that product and learning from our customers. This release of Zencoder is the result. As for the last question: when you're offered a spot in YC, you don't turn it down!

Judson 16y ago

I long for the day when a really fast internet connection + Zencoder can replace my Handbrake setup. Probably not Zencoder's premier market though...

mickeyben 16y ago

I personally use HeyWatch, for less volume the price is way cheaper. It's 0.05e/video, you double the price if you need HD.

fizzfur 16y ago

So is zencoder _only_ for h264 encoding? Site didn't make the output formats very clear.