Tech Talk

Available today, Zencoder is discounting the cost of every output after the first by 20%. You don't have to do anything to get this discount--it will automatically be applied every time you encode a single input file to multiple output files. However, this only works if the outputs are a part of the same job; if you submit two separate jobs with the same input file, you won't see a discount. Within a job, the highest priced output is run at full price and every additional output receives the discount. So, if you encode an input file to two HD outputs and two SD outputs, one of the HD outputs and both of the SD outputs would be 20% off.

When you're offering infrastructure in the cloud - Cloud SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, or whatever you want to call it - one of the most helpful things you can do is offer amazing customer service. The basic reason for this is simple. Cloud computing is all about outsourcing critical infrastructure. Because it's oursourced, you're at the mercy of your cloud provider. Because it's critical infrastructure, it has to work, 100% of the time. If your email/servers/phones/storage/video/maps/payments go down, you're in trouble. In other words: cloud services are a black box, but a very important black box. If something goes wrong, what can you do?

Zencoder's Heroku add-on is live. Now anyone using the Heroku platform can use Zencoder as an add-on and enjoy unified billing with their Heroku account. It's dead-simple to get started, just: heroku addons:add zencoder:dev. The "Developer" account is just like the Zencoder "Test" account that will allow free integration using short test clips.

Zencoder has encoded over a million videos since we launched 6 months ago. That means that we have all sorts of interesting statistics about how people are using online video. Here are a few of them.

As developers, we spend a good portion of our days on the command-line. For a long time I've wanted to have a way to interact with Zencoder on the command-line. I finally got the chance to start on it when I was at RubyConf a couple of weeks ago. So, now it's time for everyone else to enjoy this CLI goodness as well. Introducing the zencoder-cli gem. It's a Ruby gem, but even if you're not a Ruby developer you can still use the command-line interface. When I started working on the CLI interface for Zencoder I looked for other command-line tools to model it after. One of the best examples that I could find (and one that I use every day) is Heroku's gem. Luckily, their gem is open source and MIT licensed, so I was able to borrow some great bits from it. Thanks Heroku! It's a work in progress, but as of today you can view account information, manage integration mode for your account, list, show, cancel, delete, and resubmit jobs, get output progress, and install and remove plugins. There is built-in help for commands as well, so it's easy to explore its capabilities yourself.

Takeoff is a very cool web app that helps people collaborate on video. They recently published a great blog post outlining their experience with video encoding. It's worth a read if you've ever worked with a video encoding system, or ever will.

We care a lot about developer happiness and productivity. That manifests itself in two ways: 1) a flexible and powerful product and 2) quick and easy integration. Today, we entered the Heroku Add-on catalog as a way to help Heroku customers get up and running with video quickly and easily. Heroku is Zencoder's analog in the application hosting world. Their product is extremely powerful, yet makes application hosting and deployment dead simple. Their add-on catalog extends that ease-of-use to third party services, which is why we created an add-on for Zencoder. Using the Zencoder add-on means one-click signup, automatic account configuration, and unified billing for Heroku customers.