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by vgurgov 5670 days ago
been there, after tens of experiments like that and using stuff like pandastream I ended up using zencoder.com. reasons?

1) its FAST(are you seriously explect someone will wait 5-40 mins on your site while vid is encoding?). 2) ffmpeg doesnt support some weird non-open source codecs that users keep sending to our site. 3)it just works. always. and takes much less than 100 lines to hook.

So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines.

2 comments

"So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines."

Sorenson Squeeze. It's right in the article.

Now, whether this Ruby code replaces all of what Sorenson Squeeze does is another matter. (I'm betting the answer is "No." http://www.sorensonmedia.com/quality-video-encoding/details/)

ffmpeg is pretty sweet, but I've run into problems converting one or another video (swf, for example) so as you've noted it won't solve everyone's conversion issues.

No - it doesn't replace all of it. Just the parts that I need. As I mention Squeeze is a fine tool but I don't need integration with Sorenson's hosting platform, and you can pretty much write whatever workflow you need in Ruby.

So I take it back - I do think this replaces Sorenson pretty handily :)

As I mention in the article, for Zencoder to work it has to upload your file. We encode from a single master which is usually well over a gig (uncompressed, fast render from our editor).

It takes a few hours to get that single file up to anywhere online. Rather than do that, I'd rather push the smaller files individually and pay nothing for it.

Make sense? And the $600 of software is Sorenson Squeeze.