4 ms·

I am curious : how is your service better than ffmpeg + some scripts ?

by badmash69 16y ago

revorad 16y ago
I guess like Dropbox is better than running rsync and some cron jobs.
- badmash69 16y ago
  That is a smug remark that misses the point. Dropbox is a service aimed at everyone and their grandma . Zencoder is a niche technology aimed at people transcoding videos. There is a whole community of us at videohelp and similar sites and we have been doing this for quite a while. We gripe moan and bitch , but we get ffmpeg , mencoder and others to work long enough to get the job done --- for the magical price of $0.0. We have several hundred manhours worth of scripts and hacks invested already. Hence my question , what do you do better than ffmpeg -- 'cause I would be willing to pay for that extra smooth encoding, streaming . This is a technical question. You should not have replied as you do not appear to know your head from your ass.
  - sanswork 16y ago
    It's the several hundred man hours worth of scripts, and learning to use them and making them work(and consistently) and paying for the hardware to run them that makes it cost more than $0.0. So I would say what they do better is remove the hassle of having to spend time and resources managing and running all of those services. Just like dropbox, and cloudkick, etc.
    - stevepotter 16y ago
      Exactly. I had a pretty solid encoder running. But it was slow and wouldn't scale well. Zencoder's pricing is right and I would rather build it into my pricing model than deal with the hassle of managing an encoding system. This frees us up to focus more on the other aspects of the app.
  - astrange 16y ago
    Why are you using mencoder if you have ffmpeg?
    - badmash69 16y ago
      good question. We like to have them both in our toolbox along with other mpeg tools such as gopchop.
  - revorad 16y ago
    Wow, sorry if that came across as smug. But I thought it was the simplest way to express Zencoder's value proposition. It's a shame you chose to ruin your perfectly good comment with such distasteful words. Please let's keep the discussion civil.
johnnygood 16y ago
I have no internal knowledge of Zencoder, but. . . Because Zencoder is running a service, they can have lots of boxes going at the same time. You might want to encode 50 things at once which would have to be queued up if you were doing it on one box, but can run simultaneously on Zencoder using their many boxes. Likewise, Zencoder can fire up high CPU boxes that will get your videos encoded faster. The faster they turn around videos, the more capacity they have. If you're low (or bursty) volume, you can't justify that cost and you go with a small instance that's slow and queue things up if there are multiple jobs at once. Plus, Zencoder is probably knows ffmpeg and the like better than you do. It's their whole company. Unless the focus of your work is video encoding, the likelihood that you will have any reason to be as knowledgeable is low. I'm not saying that Zencoder is right for everything. They have certain economies of scale since they're encoding video for many people that kick in which mean that you can have 20 boxes encoding things for you at the same time for a few hours without having to pay for them all the time or going through the hassle of creating 20 encoding boxes and then getting rid of them so that you can use that capacity for an hour or so. That said, if you have a slow, steady flow that isn't too concerned with time or you're popular enough that you've hit those economies of scale yourself, Zencoder might not be right for you. Oh, plus you might not want to deal with ffmpeg and such. Some people would rather it be abstracted away a bit.
gry 16y ago
Have you _tried_? It's not easy. Every container has audio/video unpleasant permutations. Mike Rowe should do a show on transcoding. We're using Zencoder daily and ran into an issue where users uploaded WMVs and the output video and audio didn't sync. It's a little known Windows Media Video Screen codec. Zencoder fixed it for us and we're paying them $100/month. Personally, I think they got the raw end. :) Transcoding, like cryptography, is best handled by those who know what they're doing. It's dark in there.
jon_dahl 16y ago
This is a fair question, and I have two answers. 1. Even if we were just using ffmpeg + simple scripts, we think there is value to using a service instead of our customers running video encoding on their own. We offer easy integration, automatic scalability, a well-designed API, and customer support. So theoretically Amazon S3 is just a file server, but it's still worth using S3. In other words, even simple technology has some benefits when packaged as a service as opposed to managing the technology yourself. 2. Beyond that, we're much more than just ffmpeg. ffmpeg is awesome, and we use ffmpeg as maybe 25%-30% of the work in our encoding chain. But video technology is really messy. There are hundreds of edge cases and non-standard files/formats/settings. The best tools take you 95% of the way there, but the remaining 5% is exceptionally painful, and a few tools plus (simple) scripts don't get you to 99%, let alone 100%. That takes thousands of hours of work, and it really makes sense to let a service handle that, instead of thousands of companies doing that work themselves. Does that make sense?

I am curious : how is your service better than ffmpeg + some scripts ?

revorad 16y ago

I guess like Dropbox is better than running rsync and some cron jobs.

badmash69 16y ago
That is a smug remark that misses the point. Dropbox is a service aimed at everyone and their grandma . Zencoder is a niche technology aimed at people transcoding videos. There is a whole community of us at videohelp and similar sites and we have been doing this for quite a while. We gripe moan and bitch , but we get ffmpeg , mencoder and others to work long enough to get the job done --- for the magical price of $0.0. We have several hundred manhours worth of scripts and hacks invested already. Hence my question , what do you do better than ffmpeg -- 'cause I would be willing to pay for that extra smooth encoding, streaming . This is a technical question. You should not have replied as you do not appear to know your head from your ass.
- sanswork 16y ago
  It's the several hundred man hours worth of scripts, and learning to use them and making them work(and consistently) and paying for the hardware to run them that makes it cost more than $0.0. So I would say what they do better is remove the hassle of having to spend time and resources managing and running all of those services. Just like dropbox, and cloudkick, etc.
  - stevepotter 16y ago
    Exactly. I had a pretty solid encoder running. But it was slow and wouldn't scale well. Zencoder's pricing is right and I would rather build it into my pricing model than deal with the hassle of managing an encoding system. This frees us up to focus more on the other aspects of the app.
- astrange 16y ago
  Why are you using mencoder if you have ffmpeg?
  - badmash69 16y ago
    good question. We like to have them both in our toolbox along with other mpeg tools such as gopchop.
- revorad 16y ago
  Wow, sorry if that came across as smug. But I thought it was the simplest way to express Zencoder's value proposition. It's a shame you chose to ruin your perfectly good comment with such distasteful words. Please let's keep the discussion civil.

johnnygood 16y ago

I have no internal knowledge of Zencoder, but. . . Because Zencoder is running a service, they can have lots of boxes going at the same time. You might want to encode 50 things at once which would have to be queued up if you were doing it on one box, but can run simultaneously on Zencoder using their many boxes. Likewise, Zencoder can fire up high CPU boxes that will get your videos encoded faster. The faster they turn around videos, the more capacity they have. If you're low (or bursty) volume, you can't justify that cost and you go with a small instance that's slow and queue things up if there are multiple jobs at once. Plus, Zencoder is probably knows ffmpeg and the like better than you do. It's their whole company. Unless the focus of your work is video encoding, the likelihood that you will have any reason to be as knowledgeable is low. I'm not saying that Zencoder is right for everything. They have certain economies of scale since they're encoding video for many people that kick in which mean that you can have 20 boxes encoding things for you at the same time for a few hours without having to pay for them all the time or going through the hassle of creating 20 encoding boxes and then getting rid of them so that you can use that capacity for an hour or so. That said, if you have a slow, steady flow that isn't too concerned with time or you're popular enough that you've hit those economies of scale yourself, Zencoder might not be right for you. Oh, plus you might not want to deal with ffmpeg and such. Some people would rather it be abstracted away a bit.

gry 16y ago

Have you _tried_? It's not easy. Every container has audio/video unpleasant permutations. Mike Rowe should do a show on transcoding. We're using Zencoder daily and ran into an issue where users uploaded WMVs and the output video and audio didn't sync. It's a little known Windows Media Video Screen codec. Zencoder fixed it for us and we're paying them $100/month. Personally, I think they got the raw end. :) Transcoding, like cryptography, is best handled by those who know what they're doing. It's dark in there.

jon_dahl 16y ago

This is a fair question, and I have two answers. 1. Even if we were just using ffmpeg + simple scripts, we think there is value to using a service instead of our customers running video encoding on their own. We offer easy integration, automatic scalability, a well-designed API, and customer support. So theoretically Amazon S3 is just a file server, but it's still worth using S3. In other words, even simple technology has some benefits when packaged as a service as opposed to managing the technology yourself. 2. Beyond that, we're much more than just ffmpeg. ffmpeg is awesome, and we use ffmpeg as maybe 25%-30% of the work in our encoding chain. But video technology is really messy. There are hundreds of edge cases and non-standard files/formats/settings. The best tools take you 95% of the way there, but the remaining 5% is exceptionally painful, and a few tools plus (simple) scripts don't get you to 99%, let alone 100%. That takes thousands of hours of work, and it really makes sense to let a service handle that, instead of thousands of companies doing that work themselves. Does that make sense?