Pure Transcoders:

FlixCloud — On-Demand Video Encoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine, Amazon EC2 and Zencoder
Encoding.com — On Demand Video Encoding
HeyWatch! — Video encoding web service
HDCloud — Video Encoding and Video Transcoding In The Cloud
Zencoder — Online Video Encoding

Closer to Platforms

mPOINT — Online Video Transcoding and Syndication
Multicast — Live Internet broadcast leader. Online video platform.

Today is my sister’s birthday, and for her gift I’m moving her new baby’s website from Totsites to Tumblon, and getting her a year of the premium subscription. Both sites allow you to blog about your child, post photos, notify family members, etc., but Totsites has super cheesy templates while Tumblon is really clean. Not to mention it’s owned by a friend of mine from Zencoder, John Dahl.

The process went smoothly enough. My sister only had about 5 blog entries, and those were easy enough to cut and past over. The only issue there is I couldn’t change the date of the new post, so I had to add an “Originally posted” line.

Photos were a bit of a challenge. My sister had over 100 photos on the old site, most with captions. I needed to download each and move them over to Tumblon. Luckily I’m currently staying with my friend Justin, a programming super stud. He saw me tirelessly copying each one at time, scolded me for not doing it programatically, then helped me write a Ruby script that would parse image URLs from Totsites, download them to my computer, and name them with their captions for easy importing into Tumblon (which has an awesome multi-photo uploader). I should probably give that script to Tumblon.

I did run into an issue with the Tumblon photo uploader when I tried adding more photos than the 50 that my free account allowed for the month. It stalled in the middle of the group and then wouldn’t let me delete or edit the ones that had been uploaded. I sent a letter to support, but I upgraded to the premium account and that fixed everything anyway.

Tumblon has some awesome developmental info built into the service. I can’t quite use it myself, but I think my sister will appreciate it. Anyway, I don’t want to give out my sister’s page, but here’s mine.

http://heffernan.tumblon.com/

Best Parenting Website

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.

Just wanted to write a quick post about the time tracking app we use at Sevenwire. It’s called Harvest, and so far we’re pretty happy with it. Their dashboard widget makes it easy to switch between projects and make notes about what you’re working on. I was able to use their iPhone app for the first time today as well. I left a timer running (as I often do) and remembered on the walk home, so I opened up the iPhone app and turned it off. Though, I just opened up the dashboard widget again, and looks like it still had the timer running anyway, so I’m gonna have to look into that.

On a day full of context switching (bleh), Nate and I thought it would be great if we had some big buttons with our clients’ logos on them that we could punch when we switch between projects. Brandon pointed out the Optimus Aux Keyboard might work. So that might be fun to try to integrate down the road if it’s not too expensive. Judging by the full keyboard, it might be.

When I first got over the fear of allowing personal finance apps access my financial data, I was trying Mint, Wesabe, and Cake Financial. At the time I wasn’t thrilled with any of them. None of them could give me a holistic view of my cash, including bank accounts, debts, and investments. Also none felt super polished, which is normally forgivable with younger apps, but a little scary when you’re giving them access to all your money.

The first to come out on top for me was Mint when they added investments to to their features. At that point I stopped using the others and have been using Mint for about 6 months now. The other apps still have their own strengths, but not enough to keep me using them in addition to Mint. For instance, Wesabe has a whole community aspect to it, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t care less about what my peers are doing with their money.

What I like best about Mint is that they always seem to be updating their interfaces. A week ago they revamped their account editing screen, and now I see they’ve taken the login form off the homepage. While some people might be put off by constant little changes, for me it shows that somebody really wants that app to be perfect, and isn’t close to being done.

Just the other day Brandon and I were remarking on how Blinksale hasn’t been updated in what seems like years. It’s great for them, because they just keep bringing in money and don’t have to do anything. As a customer, it’s a little disappointing.

Something tells me Mint won’t go that route. It’s helped inspire me to get Roommate App launched, knowing that I can continue to keep perfecting it afterward.