First, PiCloud looks really interesting and extremely useful. It's solving a different problem than Zencoder - we operate on different levels. (We've actually t

First, PiCloud looks really interesting and extremely useful. It's solving a different problem than Zencoder - we operate on different levels. (We've actually talked to the PiCloud folks in the past about working together.) Just to give a little detail on the video front: if you only run ffmpeg, you're guaranteed not to support a few dozen edge cases. You'll run into a non-trivial number of codec incompatibilities (>1% at a typical UGC site), audio/video sync issues, aspect ratio distortion, edge case bugs, etc. You also won't get the best output quality or compression, and you won't be able to do certain "advanced" features (like auto-rotate rotated videos). That's not to say that ffmpeg is a bad tool. It's a great tool, and an incredible open-source project. But using it (well) isn't easy. At Zencoder, we use ffmpeg alongside a dozen other tools, both open-source and commercial. More importantly, we "drive" those tools with a lot of custom logic - to date, we have about 50 fixes and improvements over vanilla transcoding tools.