Category Archives: Transcoding

AWS Elastic Transcoder Converts Videos Easily for Pennies a Minute

Amazon has announced a new service designed to make transcoding video for use on multiple devices a snap, without having to deal with an EC2 instance or transcoding software. Controlled via the Management Console and using S3 buckets, or via APIs for developer use, Elaastic Transcoder uses presets to eliminate trial-and-error and guesswork.

“Amazon Elastic Transcoder manages all aspects of the transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding “job” specifying the location of your source video and how you want it transcoded. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices. All these features are available via service APIs and the AWS Management Console.”

Amazon Elastic Transcoder supports transcoding into H.264 video and AAC audio in an MP4 container, and supports most common media formats for input including H.264, AAC, MP4, MPEG-2, FLV, 3GP and AVI.

Full details available at the AWS Blog.

Google Compute Engine and Cloud Video Transcoding — How Does it Compare?

Zencoder performed some initial comparison tests of Google Compute Engine versus Amazon EC2 for transfering and transcoding video.

“On EC2, we use Cluster Compute instances, which are fast dual-CPU machines in two sizes: 4XL and 8XL. We compared these with the fastest GCE instance type, which is currently a single-CPU 8-core server.”

Here’s one of their resulting charts:

Read the full post for details.