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Comment by DarkShikari | Hacker News Reader

General nitpick for articles like this: if you improved X about your service by switching from application A to application B, simply say it. Phrasing like that used in this article implies (falsely) that Zencoder wrote their own encoder.

"We made our web server 5 times faster!" might sound amazing, but if you really mean "we switched from Apache to Nginx", it's misleading.

Also, FAAC is widely known to be pretty bad. Even LAME MP3 is quite a bit better at 128kbps, to say nothing of Vorbis, good AAC encoders like Nero or Apple, and Opus/CELT.

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Yep, we didn't write our own encoder - we evaluated and licensed a third party encoder. Article edited to make this more clear. The problem (at this point at least) is that our software licensing agreement with the third party includes confidentiality, so we can't name the software without permission. Stupid, I know. But you can probably guess, or figure out, what it is. ;)

I've seen confidentiality the other way (where a vendor can't say who their customers are) but why would someone not want a customer to tell the world how great their software is?

Only reason I can think is that if the customer messes up the implementation and creates a subpar service with it then it reflects poorly on the source provider.

Actually another reason might be that the source provider doesn't want other users to know about each other to compare licensing agreements and such.

I'd guess it was written by a lawyer who was more concerned about a customer telling the world how great their software isn't. And a blanket "do not mention" statement is probably safer than a "do not mention negatively".

I get what you're saying, but Zencoder's product isn't an encoder, its a cloud based encoding service (we're happy customers) as a consumer the actual implementation is a black box, as an engineer I appreciate the process they went through and also appreciate that they explained the way they got there.

If Heroku switched from Apache to Nginx and saw a marked improvement in the performance I'm find with them saying "We're serving pages 5x faster".

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