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Comment by bdickason | Hacker News Reader

Could not agree more. Video encoding is still damn expensive. We're using encoding.com and although they have great customer support, we're still paying roughly $1/video to encode. 5% of these videos will account for 95% of the views.

Why pay $1 to encode an unpopular video then $0.001 for the bandwidth?

Encoding is the only piece of our video model that currently doesn't scale directly.

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You check out Zencoder? http://zencoder.com/

Another HN community gem imho.

A hacker I know (who has I team I believe - the debuggable.com guys - both successful bloggers and core teamembers of the cakephp community) has been working on transload.it for a while, it's a pretty good service despite still being in beta, but I haven't put it through its paces like I'm sure you would. (I was working on a wordpress plugin.) It sits on ec2 and will save right into your s3.

http://transloadit.com

I don't know their plans for the full release, but they could be a way to break out of your lock in with encoding.com.

Thanks! I'll check them out :)

We actually offload right to Akamai so the s3 integration isn't a big deal for us, but anything to drop the price of bandwidth or encoding is a win these days :(

Tho I must say the encoding guys are awesome so it will take a damn good product to make me leave them.

Wow. This might be perfect for an upcoming project. I wish there was pricing info though. :-/

I am very confused. You can rent a 12GB RAM 8-core Nehalem system for under $400 per month - surely such a system can encode much more than 400 videos in 30 days?

http://www.100tb.com/dedicated-hosting/inferno-enterprise-ho...

Correct. 400 videos in 30 days is no problem. However, video encoding is purely a 'peak' architecture issue. If your videos take longer than 10 minutes (give or take a few) to encode, they leave or complain.

This is fine at 4am but during peak times, we see 100-200 videos uploaded in the course of 5 minutes... and we're a small video 'network.'

During off-peak times, we see maybe 5-10 videos per hour. So it doesn't really help us to have a full time computer or four.. we've gone down this route. The 'cloud' tech is really the best way to do it.

You could also buy a computer - they're pretty cheap. Or has that gone out of fashion?

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