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Comment by gklitt | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone with experience using Zencoder (http://zencoder.com/en/) see advantages/disadvantages of this new Amazon service compared to Zencoder, which has been around for a while? Zencoder is owned by Brightcove and I'm sure they will be fully capable of putting up a good fight, but I can't imagine this won't take a significant amount of business away from them...

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I have been using Zencoder in our product for about 2 years and have loved it. Super easy to setup through their API and I have run into very few issues over the last couple years.

However, we are running 10k minutes a month through there and cutting our monthly encoding bill in half is pretty hard to pass up. AWS definitely has less features, but the feature set they do support is exactly what we are using Zencoder for. Probably going to wait a couple months to see if Zencoder decides to lower their pricing and if not take a look at switching.

I'm thinking about the same. Give it a few months, to see if Zencoder lowers its pricing. But yes, half price to have the same features we use with Zencoder is tempting.

AWS only supports MP4, zencoder supports a whole host of them,significant being TS files for HTTP Live streaming needed by IOS devices.

I transcoded it in to FLV and it worked www.cloudshoring.in

Surprisingly, Elastic Transcoder doesn't look to be very price competitive with Zencoder at scale. Zencoder is $0.02/minute, while this is $0.015 (stdef) and $0.030 (hidef).

If you're doing hidef content, Zencoder is a clear (pricing) win.

EDIT: Never mind... Zencoder charges double for hidef content too.

Zencoder charges double the normal rate for HD videos, so it is $0.04 for HD

I am also curious about the how fast the AWS service will be. Zencoder is pretty fast. http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-...

I was under the impression Zencoder already runs on the AWS infrastructure:

* https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/zencoder

* http://gigaom.com/2011/04/12/zencoder-raises-2m-for-cloud-ba...

Yes, they do,they use the cluster compute instances:http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-com... I doubt if amazon is going to use them.

We've done some preliminary testing, and this AWS Transcoding service is very fast. It's good enough to the point where I don't even care to consider this a factor in our AWS vs Zencoder comparisons.

Can you share any numbers? How long did it take to encode a 30 minute HD clip?

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