7 ms·

How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

70 points by jon_dahl 15y ago

dboyd 15y ago
> Early on, we decided to focus on selling to engineers. This shows in their documentation. I am working with their API, and everything is very well documented. This also shows in their support. Being able to jump into a Campfire room with the same people who commit to their github repos makes for quickly resolved issues. Keep up the good work Zencoder!
- tomsaffell 15y ago
  Seconded. The docs great and the support is first class. And the API-request builder extremely useful when getting started.
jameskilton 15y ago
Switching to Zencoder was the best decision my company made to handle video uploads. They seriously are the best, by far. They even support full HD and audio only, and there are just a few file formats they don't yet support (like GoToMeeting). If you need video encoding, use Zencoder. Don't even try to figure out your own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not worth the effort.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > Don't even try to figure out your own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not worth the effort. Or you could, I don't know, consider other for-pay solutions.
Joeboy 15y ago
Oh is that what it is. I'd seen the name but imagined it was to do with Buddhism influenced programming or something.
untog 15y ago
One feature Zencoder still doesn't have (AFAIK?) that I find invaluable is allowing users to upload directly to the encoding service, bypassing your server entirely. Thankfully, Transloadit (no, not affiliated, just a happy customer) does offer that service- it means that we don't have to worry about handling user uploads as well as not worrying about video encoding.
- aculver 15y ago
  The solution is to pair Zencoder up with something like Amazon S3. We run on Heroku, so we must allow our customers to bypass our server when uploading videos. (Heroku has a 10 MB upload limit.) In Rails I use the s3_swf_upload gem to allow folks to upload directly to our S3 buckets. When uploading is done between the browser and S3, a JavaScript callback method hits our server and tells it where the upload is so that the app can keep track of the file and tell Zencoder to do it's thing on the file. If you decide to do this, let me know if you need any help.
jpdoctor 15y ago
Strange business. Professional encoding tools are about $5-6K, so they cater to folks who have large needs, but not large enough to warrant a $6K investment.
- sp332 15y ago
  Would $6k include hardware, or just a software license?
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    Software only. Determine your need for the number of processors and add that on. I'm looking at their $2000/mo plan for 100,000 minutes of video. Compare: Modern hardware does HD faster than real time, there are 43,000 minutes in a month. So for a quad core machine, you already have a comfortable margin.
    - jon_dahl 15y ago
      This assumes that you can evenly distribute your transcoding load over the course of a month. For most customers, transcoding needs are severely peaky - 10x or more from peak-to-average. So you either buy for the peaks and your hardware goes idle 90% of the time, or buy for the average and see long queue times. For most video publishers, each on-premise machine ends up using only a small fraction of 43,000 minutes each month.
      - jfb 15y ago
        Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true.
        jpdoctor 15y ago
        > Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true Wha? You think that Zencoder wrote their own codecs? They're selling an API and cloud tech, and with 20 people are certainly wrapping somebody else's encoding.
aculver 15y ago
I absolutely love Zencoder! Highly recommended. I wanted to encourage our customers to upload screencast style video demos of their apps to be presented within a product shot of an iPhone or iPad on their website (e.g. http://aeirtalk.com/ http://aeirtalk.com/ and http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/ http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/). In order to present the videos using HTML 5, it turned out we must encode the videos into three different formats (H.264, Ogg Theora, WebM.) Zencoder's API request builder made this a total breeze! I don't think I ever read the API documentation. Furthermore, I never have to worry about what format our customers are uploading. We don't do a ton of video encoding, so our bill is never more than a few bucks a month. It's better than free when you consider how much time we didn't waste maintaining a server with ffmpeg on it. :)
maximusprime 15y ago
Not to be harsh, but how many other transcoding services are there? I can think of none.
- malkia 15y ago
  That was posted few weeks ago. It's from zencoder's site, comparing to other 3 competitors (probably biased), but shows that there is already competition: http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-10x-faster-than-the-competition/ http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-...
  - jon_dahl 15y ago
    > probably biased Thanks for the trust. ;)
  - 9999 15y ago
    Sorry, but I can't help but feel that it wouldn't be that difficult to get similar performance by setting up a free AMI for people to do exactly this sort of thing using their own EC2 instance. What kind of value does zencoder actually add vs. running an ec2 instance with ffmpeg handling the transcoding?
    - jfb 15y ago
      Video is extraordinarily complex?
      - 9999 15y ago
        That doesn't really answer my question (and I am a potential customer). How exactly does zencoder add value to justify their additional costs? Converting video with ffmpeg is trivial in my experience. What exactly does zencoder do that's better than anyone else? Has zencoder actually extended ffmpeg in a deeply meaningful way--e.g. modified the codebase to handle new codecs, new containers, or transcode much, much faster than a basic ffmpeg install? The website is not particularly helpful in that regard and strikes me as a bunch of smoke and mirrors surrounding a pedestrian ffmpeg implementation running in the "cloud." In my experience it is far more efficient to transcode very high resolution files (4k or even 1080p) locally, and then upload a real deliverable (at much greater speed now that it has been compressed).
awm 15y ago
Any estimate as to the time of transcoded content? Also, does the term "video" mean # movies in, or # of streams (movie at certain bitrate/width/etc) out?
ww520 15y ago
Zencoder looks good. I'm curious on how their billing process works, or how billing works for PaaS. Does customer prepay to buy credit or do they invoice a customer monthly?

70 points by jon_dahl 15y ago

dboyd 15y ago

> Early on, we decided to focus on selling to engineers. This shows in their documentation. I am working with their API, and everything is very well documented. This also shows in their support. Being able to jump into a Campfire room with the same people who commit to their github repos makes for quickly resolved issues. Keep up the good work Zencoder!

tomsaffell 15y ago
Seconded. The docs great and the support is first class. And the API-request builder extremely useful when getting started.

jameskilton 15y ago

Switching to Zencoder was the best decision my company made to handle video uploads. They seriously are the best, by far. They even support full HD and audio only, and there are just a few file formats they don't yet support (like GoToMeeting). If you need video encoding, use Zencoder. Don't even try to figure out your own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not worth the effort.

jpdoctor 15y ago
> Don't even try to figure out your own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not worth the effort. Or you could, I don't know, consider other for-pay solutions.

Joeboy 15y ago

Oh is that what it is. I'd seen the name but imagined it was to do with Buddhism influenced programming or something.

untog 15y ago

One feature Zencoder still doesn't have (AFAIK?) that I find invaluable is allowing users to upload directly to the encoding service, bypassing your server entirely. Thankfully, Transloadit (no, not affiliated, just a happy customer) does offer that service- it means that we don't have to worry about handling user uploads as well as not worrying about video encoding.

aculver 15y ago
The solution is to pair Zencoder up with something like Amazon S3. We run on Heroku, so we must allow our customers to bypass our server when uploading videos. (Heroku has a 10 MB upload limit.) In Rails I use the s3_swf_upload gem to allow folks to upload directly to our S3 buckets. When uploading is done between the browser and S3, a JavaScript callback method hits our server and tells it where the upload is so that the app can keep track of the file and tell Zencoder to do it's thing on the file. If you decide to do this, let me know if you need any help.

jpdoctor 15y ago

Strange business. Professional encoding tools are about $5-6K, so they cater to folks who have large needs, but not large enough to warrant a $6K investment.

sp332 15y ago
Would $6k include hardware, or just a software license?
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  Software only. Determine your need for the number of processors and add that on. I'm looking at their $2000/mo plan for 100,000 minutes of video. Compare: Modern hardware does HD faster than real time, there are 43,000 minutes in a month. So for a quad core machine, you already have a comfortable margin.
  - jon_dahl 15y ago
    This assumes that you can evenly distribute your transcoding load over the course of a month. For most customers, transcoding needs are severely peaky - 10x or more from peak-to-average. So you either buy for the peaks and your hardware goes idle 90% of the time, or buy for the average and see long queue times. For most video publishers, each on-premise machine ends up using only a small fraction of 43,000 minutes each month.
    - jfb 15y ago
      Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true.
      - jpdoctor 15y ago
        > Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true Wha? You think that Zencoder wrote their own codecs? They're selling an API and cloud tech, and with 20 people are certainly wrapping somebody else's encoding.

aculver 15y ago

I absolutely love Zencoder! Highly recommended. I wanted to encourage our customers to upload screencast style video demos of their apps to be presented within a product shot of an iPhone or iPad on their website (e.g. http://aeirtalk.com/ http://aeirtalk.com/ and http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/ http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/). In order to present the videos using HTML 5, it turned out we must encode the videos into three different formats (H.264, Ogg Theora, WebM.) Zencoder's API request builder made this a total breeze! I don't think I ever read the API documentation. Furthermore, I never have to worry about what format our customers are uploading. We don't do a ton of video encoding, so our bill is never more than a few bucks a month. It's better than free when you consider how much time we didn't waste maintaining a server with ffmpeg on it. :)

maximusprime 15y ago

Not to be harsh, but how many other transcoding services are there? I can think of none.

malkia 15y ago
That was posted few weeks ago. It's from zencoder's site, comparing to other 3 competitors (probably biased), but shows that there is already competition: http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-10x-faster-than-the-competition/ http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-...
- jon_dahl 15y ago
  > probably biased Thanks for the trust. ;)
- 9999 15y ago
  Sorry, but I can't help but feel that it wouldn't be that difficult to get similar performance by setting up a free AMI for people to do exactly this sort of thing using their own EC2 instance. What kind of value does zencoder actually add vs. running an ec2 instance with ffmpeg handling the transcoding?
  - jfb 15y ago
    Video is extraordinarily complex?
    - 9999 15y ago
      That doesn't really answer my question (and I am a potential customer). How exactly does zencoder add value to justify their additional costs? Converting video with ffmpeg is trivial in my experience. What exactly does zencoder do that's better than anyone else? Has zencoder actually extended ffmpeg in a deeply meaningful way--e.g. modified the codebase to handle new codecs, new containers, or transcode much, much faster than a basic ffmpeg install? The website is not particularly helpful in that regard and strikes me as a bunch of smoke and mirrors surrounding a pedestrian ffmpeg implementation running in the "cloud." In my experience it is far more efficient to transcode very high resolution files (4k or even 1080p) locally, and then upload a real deliverable (at much greater speed now that it has been compressed).

awm 15y ago

Any estimate as to the time of transcoded content? Also, does the term "video" mean # movies in, or # of streams (movie at certain bitrate/width/etc) out?

ww520 15y ago

Zencoder looks good. I'm curious on how their billing process works, or how billing works for PaaS. Does customer prepay to buy credit or do they invoice a customer monthly?