Sponsored by Zencoder.
As much as I want to trust this benchmark, I'm doubtful.
If Zencorer knew which account you used, they could've assigned the best dedicated servers to your jobs.
As much as I want to trust this benchmark, I'm doubtful.
If Zencorer knew which account you used, they could've assigned the best dedicated servers to your jobs.
If you want to verify the results yourself, we're going to post the benchmarking source code to Github this afternoon. You can review the methodology that CloudHarmony used and run the tests yourself, with your own account, without us having any knowledge that you're testing us. That way, we have no way of cheating. You can even change up the files and use different encoding profiles to be sure that we didn't pick specific files or settings that happen to be faster at Zencoder.
Every test was done using the same core settings (codecs, profiles, resolution, frame rate, bitrates, two-pass encoding). Beyond that, CloudHarmony used the default settings at each provider. We'll try to publish each video for visual inspection, but suffice it to say that they all look pretty close, especially three of the four, which use the same core encoder (x264) and the same settings. There may be microversion differences and minor variations in settings, but not much. The fourth uses MainConcept, which isn't a bad encoder itself. You'll probably see a bigger spread in audio quality - Encoding.com and Panda rely on faac, I think, which is an abandoned AAC encoder that isn't very good.
To be fair our customers are not the same type. We mainly have people who trans-code a lot of videos (like DVD libraries) and in that case we are a lot cheaper than zencoder.
Our presets also use a much more recent version of ffmpeg since we are not stuck with command-line compatibility issues
disc: I am not affiliated with zencoder in any way.