1) its FAST(are you seriously explect someone will wait 5-40 mins on your site while vid is encoding?). 2) ffmpeg doesnt support some weird non-open source codecs that users keep sending to our site. 3)it just works. always. and takes much less than 100 lines to hook.
So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines.
Sorenson Squeeze. It's right in the article.
Now, whether this Ruby code replaces all of what Sorenson Squeeze does is another matter. (I'm betting the answer is "No." http://www.sorensonmedia.com/quality-video-encoding/details/)
ffmpeg is pretty sweet, but I've run into problems converting one or another video (swf, for example) so as you've noted it won't solve everyone's conversion issues.
So I take it back - I do think this replaces Sorenson pretty handily :)
It takes a few hours to get that single file up to anywhere online. Rather than do that, I'd rather push the smaller files individually and pay nothing for it.
Make sense? And the $600 of software is Sorenson Squeeze.
If you will need two or more encoding jobs running in parallel, or to push video properties for each file to the site, you will get into trouble very soon, and 100 lines will grow to 10000.
He didn't produce high value software ,the guys who wrote the software he used did.
Its an argument for homebrew over bloated packages, at least when dealing with process. And it was a great tutorial on Ruby for managing that.
Probably worth noteing that he doesn't even seem to know how his own script works. He was puzzled that it was burning all of his CPUs without him having to make it do that, when that is exactly the behavior you would expect.
