How To Replace a $600 Piece of Software with 100 Lines of Ruby

been there, after tens of experiments like that and using stuff like pandastream I ended up using zencoder.com. reasons?<p>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.<p>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.

It's just like "Replacing the blog software with HTML file I created myself with Notepad". Sometimes it will work, sometimes it wont.<p>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.

The short version: guy wraps FFMPEG with a little script and suddenly thinks himself to be gods gift to man.<p>He didn't produce high value software ,the guys who wrote the software he used did.