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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

I guess like Dropbox is better than running rsync and some cron jobs.

That is a smug remark that misses the point. Dropbox is a service aimed at everyone and their grandma . Zencoder is a niche technology aimed at people transcoding videos. There is a whole community of us at videohelp and similar sites and we have been doing this for quite a while. We gripe moan and bitch , but we get ffmpeg , mencoder and others to work long enough to get the job done --- for the magical price of $0.0. We have several hundred manhours worth of scripts and hacks invested already. Hence my question , what do you do better than ffmpeg -- 'cause I would be willing to pay for that extra smooth encoding, streaming . This is a technical question. You should not have replied as you do not appear to know your head from your ass.

It's the several hundred man hours worth of scripts, and learning to use them and making them work(and consistently) and paying for the hardware to run them that makes it cost more than $0.0.

So I would say what they do better is remove the hassle of having to spend time and resources managing and running all of those services. Just like dropbox, and cloudkick, etc.

Exactly. I had a pretty solid encoder running. But it was slow and wouldn't scale well. Zencoder's pricing is right and I would rather build it into my pricing model than deal with the hassle of managing an encoding system. This frees us up to focus more on the other aspects of the app.

Why are you using mencoder if you have ffmpeg?

good question. We like to have them both in our toolbox along with other mpeg tools such as gopchop.

Wow, sorry if that came across as smug. But I thought it was the simplest way to express Zencoder's value proposition.

It's a shame you chose to ruin your perfectly good comment with such distasteful words. Please let's keep the discussion civil.

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