Filepicker.io + Zencoder | Hacker News Reader

Filepicker.io + Zencoder

blog.filepicker.io

53 pointsbrettcvz20 comments

The Zencoder blogpost cautions:

It is a BAD IDEA to put your Zencoder API key in plain text inside of JavaScript. Just to repeat that one more time, do not use this in code that other people could possibly access. Nothing would stop people from taking your API key and encoding all the video they wanted.

The implication is that I couldn't therefore put this code in any internet-facing webpages.

Which leads me to wonder what the use-cases are for this implementation ?

This is a demonstration of how the two can work together, but in a production setup you'll want to do the following transformation:

Instead of getting the fpurl and passing that to zencoder via a $.ajax call, first pass it to your server and then hit zencoder server-side using one of their libraries.

+1 We've been using both zencoder and filepicker for our Ember/Rails app and that is exactly how it works. Ember posts fpurl to our Rails API, rails hits zencoder to kick-off processing job. API keys stay secure and files never pass thru our system. Awesome!

Awesome! I had no intention of the advanced demo getting as big as it did, otherwise I would have used Ember from the beginning. We're going to post a longer tutorial using Filepicker + Zencoder + Socket.IO pretty soon.

Which you could do before this integration ?

(I'm not trying to be down on what has been developed here - just trying to understand how it is different from what was already possible)

Yup, this partnership is more about providing demos and showing people in each of our respective communities how they can use the two services together. Fortunately both of our APIs were powerful enough already that we didn't have to write any additional library code to integrate the two

(can't reply directly due to nesting limitations)

Because we're so heavily client-side, we created a policy-based security api to allow you to control the actions allowed using the filepicker.js library, as well as actions in your developer portal that you can use to make things read-only, set the max allowed file size, etc.

https://developers.filepicker.io/docs/security/

Ok, thanks - out of interest would my FilePicker API key be subject to the same vector of attack as a Zencoder key ?

It seems to me that most of the FilePicker documentation talks about using it in client side applications ?

Quicklinks:

- demo: http://zenpicker.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dropzone...

- source code: https://github.com/zencoder/filepicker-zencoder

- Full tutorial: https://gist.github.com/sh1ps/e0884be21fb3f45cbddc or http://blog.zencoder.com/2013/03/20/look-ma-no-backend-uploa...

Edited to add zencoder blog post

I just recorded my video but my since Flash auto-selects line-in for me, no audio was actually recorded.

We ran into that problem a lot while trying to optimize the user experience of the VideoView recording application. It turns out end users will ignore lack of audio feedback and some will even continue recording when the interface shows nothing but a black screen in case the wrong camera is selected.

We're building a semi-automated selection interface for it now using entropy estimations to select the best camera and microphone, but since you're probably optimizing more for a quick start I'd suggest doing a quality analysis (like PExQ for example) after the fact so you can at least give an early warning that there may have been an issue recording the video.

This is great. Spinning out a consumer-friendly front end to the Zencoder API has been in my sparkfile for too long. I even shared the same idea with HN[0] because I know some bootstrapper is going to make a killing if they can pair it with Stripe and push it out the door in a weekend.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5274117

A co-founder of Zencoder even replied to my suggestion mentioning that there's a market for it.

(If you're a hardcore wantrepreneur, here is your idea. Now go forth and build the bootstrapped SaaS biz you always wanted. Send me a link when its done, I know some people that would probably use it. Seems I can't ever find a spare weekend to build it myself)

We've been using Filepicker.io + Zencoder to encode customer videos for a while. Shameless plug: http://www.vipecloud.com/

Can't wait to mess around with this!

To be honest, I'm surprised there isn't more competition in this market, as filepicker has been saving me and the rest of our dev team hours and hours of valuable time.

Check out http://transloadit.com There is the competition in the market. And they have also nailed the client-side security thing.

You should try https://uploadcare.com/

Shhh don't tell anyone! :D

Hey Brett,

Any chance filepicker.io will get any faster in the short term? Facebook integration has been really slow lately.

Looks awesome!

Looks awesome. I can totally use it!

This is huge. Congratulations!

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