Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

While I love cloud services like these, I always wonder about it for the high-end accounts. With pricing at $3.60/hour of encoded video, it seems building your own render server seems to pay out fairly soon.<p>For <a href="http://OneFrameOfFame.com" rel="nofollow">http://OneFrameOfFame.com</a> I was looking for a video encoding service that would take a bunch of images &#38; sound file as input, and would encode it to a video file. Since none of the cloud video encoding parties I looked at (Encoding.com, Heywatch, ankoder) offered this, I ended up renting a linode VPS and encoding myself with ffmpeg. Which turned out to be not that hard. If you need the management tools, there are packages like <a href="http://pandastream.org/" rel="nofollow">http://pandastream.org/</a>

This interests me for ThinkCode.TV. We tried half a dozen companies and were overall disappointed with their results. (Ogg Theora in particular was challenging for most.)

This is great. I've had clients years ago want to offer video sharing on their site and I basically have to tell them it's a major project so they might as well have their users upload it to YouTube instead. This is exactly the kind of service that makes video UGC possible, even easy.

I long for the day when a really fast internet connection + Zencoder can replace my Handbrake setup.<p>Probably not Zencoder's premier market though...

What are the output codecs and container formats? Is it just me or is this information conspicuously missing?

How are they provisioning and managing infrastructure resources? Are they using AWS/EC2 on their back end?

I recall Zencoder had promo material out at Railsconf last year. I'm curious what's changed or why they've become a YC company.

I personally use HeyWatch, for less volume the price is way cheaper. It's 0.05e/video, you double the price if you need HD.

So is zencoder _only_ for h264 encoding? Site didn't make the output formats very clear.