What transcoding services can people recommend? [closed]

Question

A client of mine needs to accept a bunch of different video files and convert them to FLV. My experience with FFMEG on a previous project has highlighted that there will be some troublesome files.

Depending on the price my client will pay for a professional service.

What are people using and how are you finding the service?

Thanks.

Answer 1

<biased answer alert> I recommend Zencoder (http://zencoder.com), built by the same folks that built Flix Cloud (http://flixcloud.com). We've put a ton of work into handling troublesome files, and we can support a wider range of input files than anyone out there. We're also the fastest service on the market and have (we think) a very developer-friendly API.

Answer 2

I can't give any recommondations, as I'm searching for a service to implement for many clients myself. However, perhaps I can help anyone else who is also looking.

It seems there are a couple type of services:

• Encoding
  • Zencoder
  • Encoding.com
  • PandaStream
  • Ankoder
  • HeyWatch
• Encoding, hosting and video players
  • Ooyala
  • Brightcove
  • 23 Video

In looking at these services, a few things to consider:

• API supported features
  • Progress calls, encoding complete pings, job tracking, output formats
  • XML or JSON or both
  • Authentication techniques (oauth etc)
• Direct client uploads (no proxy to your server)
• Storage of complete video
  • Temp storage, FTP to your server, Amazon S3
  • Availability of direct (if hosted) url for each format
• Encoding formats
  • All HTML 5 formats (mp4 h264, ogg etc)
  • Mobile encoding support (special settings for android)
• Support
  • SLAs?
  • Phone/email/turn over time?
• Cost (many different payment types)
  • Time of video
  • Number & Time of outputs
  • Filesize (input/output)
  • Large volume discounts