I've done video transcoding in the past. While I wasn't an expert on the legal/patent issues, I know that the product we used (helix mobile producer, from Real) indemnified us such that we could then use ffmpeg as long as it was on the same machine.
If you use this service, you might want to inquire into patent issues, and if you are covered.
Here's ffmpeg's take: http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html Here's Zencoder's take: http://zencoder.com/docs/codecs-and-formats/#licensing
You could say that about any blog post about any piece of software. Just because there's been a lot of (rather emotionally driven) press recently about video patents doesn't make it any different.
Do you know any resources for "current" recommended encoding settings (with regard to US-based ISP speeds & typical consumer home networks - dsl, cable, fios, cellular, 802.11g/n etc.)?
I know Flash Media Server will stream .mp4 h.264 video to Flash 9 and greater. iPhone/Ipod Touch requires a maximum encoding setting of Baseline, Level 3.0, iPad Level 3.1.
I really want to know what bitrates at which speeds and resolutions.
Depending on the user's connection, how many different bitrates would the video be encoded for (iPad over 3G, ipad over 802.11g, ipad over 802.11n, with cable, dsl, or fios)?
If you pay for a good transcoding service, you're not just paying for being able to run FFMPEG. That's the easy part. The hard part is dealing with thousands of combinations of audio and video codecs, containers, pixel and display aspect ratios, handling improperly encoded files and optimizing to produce the best quality at a given size. There's a reason entire companies are based on being good at these things, and people are willing to pay for it. This is not trivial stuff.
I'm not knocking the PiCloud product at all, as there are certainly some limited use cases where it would fit nicely and get the job done cheaply. But it is in no way an apples-to-apples comparison between a generic FFMPEG setup and a professional encoding service like Zencoder or Encoding.com.
Just to give a little detail on the video front: if you only run ffmpeg, you're guaranteed not to support a few dozen edge cases. You'll run into a non-trivial number of codec incompatibilities (>1% at a typical UGC site), audio/video sync issues, aspect ratio distortion, edge case bugs, etc. You also won't get the best output quality or compression, and you won't be able to do certain "advanced" features (like auto-rotate rotated videos).
That's not to say that ffmpeg is a bad tool. It's a great tool, and an incredible open-source project. But using it (well) isn't easy. At Zencoder, we use ffmpeg alongside a dozen other tools, both open-source and commercial. More importantly, we "drive" those tools with a lot of custom logic - to date, we have about 50 fixes and improvements over vanilla transcoding tools.
(The difference will lower for higher output resolutions. Nonetheless, PiCloud should always be cheaper than Zencoder's pay-as-you-go rate).
I find this interesting, but two questions.
1. Would you be able to provide a downloadable working copy of the python source?
2. Picloud seems to be limited to 5GB files, most video files that one would transcode are larger than that. Is there a way around this?
2. Our cloud.files module does have a 5GB file size limit. However, you are free to store your data elsewhere (probably on EC2 for fast and free data transfer), and access it using PiCloud. For example, you could store the video files on your own CouchDB server running on EC2, and simply query the server in your code (using the python-couchdb module) for the video.
