jon_dahl

The second one, on the other hand, was downvoted for asking why you were downvoted. ;)

Good talk, all in all. 4chan is a refreshing change from VC backed, liquidation-event-directed online communities. Not that 4chan is a Facebook replacement by any means, but it's helpful to remember that an enormous part of what's interesting on the internet is open-source, non-profit, or not profit-motivated.

More likely, they will announce licensing terms and ask for everyone using WebM to acquire a license and pay royalties. Then, after a window of time, they will go after companies that don't license the patents.

Whatever the case, congratulations to both sides if this comes true.

But those portfolios are only equal if you believe the future will look a lot like the past. If you take black swans into account, the portfolio with the higher "safe" allocation is preferable. If Peak Oil or Nuke War or Famine drives stocks down by 90% for several decades, the 70/30 portfolio leaves you with 37% of your wealth, while the 50/50 portfolio leaves you with 55%.

My black swan portfolio would look like this:

* 25% bonds (US treasuries)

* 25% tips (inflation-protected bonds)

* 25% US small cap value stocks

* 25% international small cap value stocks

I'd consider adding in precious metals if they weren't so hot right now.

Licensing is the other issue: VP6 is royalty-free, while H.264 isn't.

MPEG video stuff is generally pretty cheap or free for low volume. Audio codecs are fairly expensive, on the other hand. AAC + MP3 + AMR is >$20K in minimum fees.

That's unique.

1. Even if we were just using ffmpeg + simple scripts, we think there is value to using a service instead of our customers running video encoding on their own. We offer easy integration, automatic scalability, a well-designed API, and customer support. So theoretically Amazon S3 is just a file server, but it's still worth using S3. In other words, even simple technology has some benefits when packaged as a service as opposed to managing the technology yourself.

2. Beyond that, we're much more than just ffmpeg. ffmpeg is awesome, and we use ffmpeg as maybe 25%-30% of the work in our encoding chain. But video technology is really messy. There are hundreds of edge cases and non-standard files/formats/settings. The best tools take you 95% of the way there, but the remaining 5% is exceptionally painful, and a few tools plus (simple) scripts don't get you to 99%, let alone 100%. That takes thousands of hours of work, and it really makes sense to let a service handle that, instead of thousands of companies doing that work themselves.

Does that make sense?

Takeoff is really well done. The UI is beautiful and really intuitive. Congrats on a great service!

Not that hard. Zencoder uses the same API whether you're a Heroku customer or not, and I expect that is true of most add-ons that are third-party services.

There is no one "best" setting, unfortunately. Here are some guidelines, though.

-- You have two real codec options in FLV: VP6 and H.264. H.264 compresses significantly better than VP6.

-- Bitrate and lossiness are directly linked. Increase bitrate and visual quality will go up (within limits, of course), and vice versa.

-- When using H.264, use Baseline profile if you're concerned about choppy video on slow computers. Main and High profiles compress better, but require more CPU to decode.

-- Use one of two encoding modes: 2-pass Variable Bitrate (VBR), or one-pass Constant Quality (e.g. CRF). One-pass VBR doesn't look good.

-- CRF mode (for x264) is great. It targets a fixed visual quality/loss, and the bitrate adjusts to match that. Think of it as an "auto-bitrate" feature.

This is a really general starting point. Any more specific questions I can answer?

Wide variability here, though. I've never had trouble finding Rails gigs around $125/hour, and have done some at higher rates.

(Edited for typo.)

The result is that some of his characters and settings are more interesting than his plots. Example: later Dark Tower series.

You're right that a well-designed UI can decrease the complexity of additional features. That said, I think it's usually true that additional features have a larger impact on the complexity of a UI than the complexity of an API. Not as a universal rule, but as a general guideline.

What does an aspiring entrepreneur do now knowing that his idea can still work but has no motivation to continue without short-term incentives?

Startups are 1% idea, 6% brilliant founders, and 93% tenacity[1]. Of course, you have to be tenacious in a smart way, which typically means iterating and knowing when to pivot. If you're not motivated to stick it out, then your best bet is probably to put the project on ice. Maybe you'll find the funding and motivation in a year or two. But unless you want to do that, you need to keep grinding it out.

The hard part about grinding it out is that you're out of money, and you outsourced your development. That puts you in a hard position. Can you take over lead development yourself, and work on it nights/weekends?

Beyond that, read some Steve Blank. Are you convinced that: (1) people really want your product, and (2) you've built a product that clicks really well with the market? If not, you need to do that before you do anything else. No point in marketing a product that doesn't click. If you've done that, then it's a matter of getting the word out.

[1] Citation needed.

I love the idea of a subscription management services, but this is still a very young space, unfortunately.