Online Video Encoding Apps (plus guide)
On2 just released FlixCloud to the press.
It’s quite an awesome app. Blazing fast at encoding video. Infinite input/output formats including VP6 flvs obviously. I wrote a PHP wrapper/library for their API that I still need to make available on Github. Contact me if you need it.
In case you haven’t seen anything about it, FlixCloud is a partnership between On2 and Zencoder.
On2 is well known for their VP6 codec that is used in most online videos. At least it seems like it’s most. H.263 and H.264 combined could have more. On2 is set to release VP8 sometime in the near future. Everything I’ve heard about it makes it seem like the dream codec. Faster to encode and decode, smaller file sizes, better quality, etc. I guess we’ll see. Adoption of the codec is a whole other story. It might be up to Adobe to make or break it by including it with Flash. That could have a huge impact on the success of FlixCloud itself.
Zencoder is online video enocoding software (Yes, it’s actually one of Sevenwire’s clients). They’re set to release a dev pay version very soon. The goal is by Rails Conf 2009. Dev pay is an online billing service from Amazon, that allows for easy billing of on-demand software running on their EC2 cloud. What this means is video website customers can startup and shutdown instances of the Zencoder software as it’s needed, and only pay for what they need. Could mean huge savings for websites that do a lot of video encoding, like YouTube and Vimeo. Although those are probably bad examples, because I’m sure they already have in-house hardware that they encode on, and switching to a SaaS solution may not be cheaper. But who knows, considering the cost of maintaining all those machines, it could be.
Someone really needs to do a wizard/guide on video encoding solutions, based on the size of your website. I can at least start with how the different solutions above stack up.
Online Video Encoder Guide
FlixCloud – You accept videos from your website users, and need those videos encoded/transcoded to a new format for use in an online video player like Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight, etc.
Zencoder – You do the same as above, but you do it a freakin lot. To the point where having control over your own army of cloud machines (EC2 or not), and working through a dev pay pricing model, could save you money.
Zencoder Pro – You’re building an app that involves users uploading and viewing videos on your site, and you need help building it.
On2 Flix Engine – You have all the hardware and resources you need to encode users’ videos yourself, but you need the software to do it. If you don’t need to encode to VP6, there’s also FFmpeg, but if you do need VP6 or any of On2’s formats, Flix Engine is your online choice. (FlixCloud and Zencoder both include Flix Engine, in case that was confusing).
There’s obviously other options out there, but these are the ones I recommend for now.