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.

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.