More power to Zencoder! I integrated their service into a client site a couple of weeks ago and their support is phenomenal. I chatted with one of the guys and he was very helpful. Another Zencoder technician actually emailed me because he noticed that some API callbacks we're errorring out. I was testing from a LAN machine and he was trying to save me some time debugging.
I'm considering integrating their service. Using ffmpeg can be a bitch when you have to deal with many combinations of input codecs.
How does it run when you send a request with hundreds of jobs? They autoscale so there is little waiting time on queues, but I don't get if that means if the scaling is per job or per user.
We autoscale very, very quickly to serve all the jobs in our system. The only limitations we place are on test jobs, where they execute sequentially per account and only 100 can be processing or waiting.
Just curious - what's your customer base composed of? Is it mostly youtube knockoffs? Adult sites? Enterprise customers?
I understand if you don't share, but I'm just curious. I do transcoding at home from DVD to MP4 for place-shifting (I <3 Handbrake), but I'm thinking your customer would be some sort of video-hosting site. Are there really that many out there?
What kind of challenges have you faced wrt bandwidth?
We have a pretty wide range of customers. It's mostly websites today - niche video sharing sites (http://schooltube.com), blogging engines (http://posterous.com), content sites (http://www.giantbomb.com/), online video publishing tools, and other sites that accept video uploads. We also have mobile and enterprise customers.
You'd be amazed how many websites out there need something like this - tens and tens of thousands. Every website with an "upload" button that accepts video or audio files needs transcoding, plus many others. And since a site like Zencoder makes it possible to do complex things with video in 2-3 hours instead of 2-3 months, we open the door to a whole new class of video functionality.
Just to give another example for a Zencoder use case (although we're definitely small fry to Zencoder): one of our clients is an acting agency representing a small number (<50) of actors. Every actor has at least one showreel to be shown on the agency's website and they come in all formats.
Rather than setting up ffmpeg and dealing with the errors it can throw up, we just set up the upload form and Zencoder takes care of all the format conversions for us. If Zencoder can't decode it, it's safe to tell the client that the file is broken.
I submitted this separately but it didn't go anywhere (no big surprise, it has a pretty narrow focus) but if you're interested in integrating Zencoder with a Rails app, the tutorial I published earlier today may be helpful:
Nice to see them moving onwards and upwards.