| 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. |