Zencoder's Posts

With infinite “airtime” and consumer demand going through the roof, a consistent theme in 2011 and now for 2012 is that high quality content is essential for entertaining and engaging viewers.  To fill the pipes, big companies are pouring big bucks into producing original content for online distribution.  Google is investing $100M in original content for YouTube.  We all rejoiced as Netflix resurrected “Arrested Development”, and Yahoo landed a Hollywood whale in Tom Hanks and his animated series. In recognition of the importance of content in advancing the online video industry, we’re highlighting our partner Concrete Interactive and the amazing product that they’ve built for HitRECord.   HitRECord, founded by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, not only facilitates the creation of high quality Internet video but is also unique in that it’s democratizing, and bringing real innovation to, the process of content creation. Founded in 2005, HitRECord has established itself as a unique destination for video artists, filmmakers, writers, animators, musicians, and videographers to collaborate and interact with Gordon-Levitt and others on a wide variety of creative endeavors.  HitRECord’s library has grown to over 20,000 complete videos.  Almost 1,000 contributors have used HitRECord to create films and video, which are available in the "TheRecord Store". Thousands more have contributed to films shown at HitRECord's live shows. When a production makes money, there’s a 50/50 revenue split between HitRECord and the co-creators.

You already know this, but iOS video is a big deal. Any serious video publisher either already supports iPad and iPhone, or needs to think hard about adding support. For some major publishers, iPad delivery represents 1/3 of total video views - or more. Encoding for iOS is a little tricky, though. iOS devices have gone through several generations of technical capabilities, and the ideal video settings for the iPhone 4 are not ideal for the iPhone 3GS or for the iPad. Fortunately, with just a few encoding profiles, you can stream high quality video to every iOS device, from the first iPhone to the iPad 2, and even prepare for future generations of mobile hardware. We've written about this before but our previous guide only described how to ensure mobile compatibility - not how to find the best settings.

We love to promote our customers and today we're highlighting VidCaster, an online video platform that uses both Zencoder and Video.js, the free, open-source HTML5 video player created by Steve Heffernan and Zencoder. Already the most widely downloaded open source HTML5 video player, the new version of Video.js offers significant feature enhancements and the easiest way to reach consumers on multiple devices and browsers. Here are some words from VidCaster founders Ray Pawulich and Kieran Farr on what they're up to, and how they use Video.js.

Video transcoding is complex. It is a multi-dimensional problem, and each dimension is complex on its own; taken together, the complexity multiplies. If you have to transcode large volumes of video, you have to worry about massive data transfer, the nuts and bolts of encoding settings, player/device compatibility, and a range of other concerns. Many organizations have dedicated employees, or even teams, to manage encoding infrastructure - even when using third-party encoders. But not everyone has that luxury. So how do you manage this complexity? What are the best practices for encoding large volumes of video?

Over the past few weeks we've been quietly slipping mentions of API V2 in to our documentation and its usage has slowly increased. We're now ready to officially announce V2 of the Zencoder API. We're introducing versioning into our API because it makes it easier for us to introduce changes without breaking backwards compatibility, plus it makes it easier for developers working with Zencoder to transition to new versions when it's convenient for them.

Amazon has been rolling out new AWS regions regularly over the last few quarters. Just this morning they announced a new Sao Paulo region. The great news is that Zencoder already operates in all AWS regions (including Sao Paulo). In your API request you can specify the region you'd like to use.

Mobile video is growing like crazy. Zencoder customer PBS just announced that viewers watched over 88 million PBS videos on iOS devices in the month of November, 86 million for their PBS Kids app alone. That's a lot of video, and 89% growth since June. All of this video - like most mobile video today - was delivered using HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), an Apple-created, HTTP-based format for streaming H.264 and AAC video in an MPEG-TS container. HTTP Live Streaming works by segmenting a long video into short pieces, typically 10 seconds, and then providing a M3U manifest that lists each segment. The player reads the manifest and determines when to pull each segment in order to ensure seamless playback.  (If you want more in-depth info on HLS, check out our guide on best practices for iOS encoding.) The problem is that MPEG-TS is an inefficient format, especially at low bitrates. The MPEG-TS format can easily introduce 10%-15% of unnecessary overhead to a file compared to a format like MP4, which increases costs and decreases picture quality, MB-for-MB. And if you're deploying a video application to the App Store, HLS isn't optional - it's mandatory if you want to display video longer than 10 minutes. Apple has rejected countless applications from the App Store for not complying with this policy.