Show HN: Framebase.io, Video for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Framebase.io, Video for Developers

framebase.io

205 pointsvu0tran53 comments

"All plans come with a free 30-day no-risk trial. We won't ask for your billing information until your trial ends. If you're not satisfied, you can export your data at any time."

I like that :D

I need details of your transcoding and streaming capabilities. Specifically, can you transcode well known formats to h.264 at various output resolutions and then create m3u8 playlists for HTTP-Live streaming? We had to roll our own solution to handle doing just that from user-generated content. I saw that RTMP was mentioned but that's it.

For doing any sort of video on mobile apps this could come in handy. Most people are just using progressive downloads on small clips or offloading to youtube these days.

I was making a video CV recruitment based Startup. We used the API from Youtube and were thinking of changing to a paid plataform. We had to options, Framey.com and framebase.io. We almost choosed framey, but I left the startup.

If the founder of framebase want a good advice from someone who used to be a potential customer, please change your pricing. Don't charge for minutes, minutes don't mean anything. Charge for numbers of video, even 1 minute videos. It's much better to know that I can have 1000 videos. And really choose what kind of charge you wanna make. If it is based on watched time or recorded. These are two different markets.

For video, pricing by minute is much closer to the cost for the provider to encode that video, so Framebase users win because they end up paying a price much closer to the actual cost.

What you're proposing would be akin to S3 just charging per file rather than by the amount of storage...

I'm proposing in a view of a potential customer. If you see the pricing of a competitor, like framey.com, they make it easier for you to choose your estimated price range.

It is just a more marketing standing point. What is better, 4gbs of music or 1000 songs?

I totally understand what you're saying, but I still disagree, at least for a service where you can upload arbitrary video. Framey is a bit different, because you can reasonably assume an upper limit to the amount of time a user will record themselves on a webcam in a browser (or restrict them to a max # of minutes).

I know you were just using it as an example, but music just isn't a good comparison for this conversation. Video is simply much more expensive than audio in just about every way, from storage to encoding.

Songs are comparable in duration (and file size), videos are not. With UGC, video file size can easily vary by the factor of 1,000. So the infrastructure required to transcode, store, and deliver a 5GB file would cost much more, compared to a 5MB file. It's difficult to come up with "simple" pricing that would fit all.

You could of course include a weasel-phrase like "videos over 5 minutes long count as one additional video for every additional 5 minutes."

Well, I disagree. The per video or per MB pricing model is a huge disadvantage for businesses which know their videos will be short or high res input.

We charge for minutes at Vive.ly. So far, the approach has worked.

Easy to explain, too - you show a 3 min video to 1,000 people - you will use 3,000 minutes.

P.S. I forgot to mention one key difference - in our case, it's a wallet payment, not a monthly fee. So if you bought a block of 3,000 min, it could last you a week or a year, depending on your usage.

Have you considered a free plan for open-source projects? Allowing folks to record screencasts and contribute them as video tutorials to help new users get up and running on open-source software would be a huge boon to many a project. This would also, I imagine, have a considerable effect on Framebase.io awareness among the very developer community you're targeting. What do you think?

I don't know if they added it after your comment (in the last 12 minutes) but there is a free plan now.

What's wrong with using youtube for this purpose?

Some people may prefer to avoid using Google services.

Youtube has an API that is free, and it's pretty good.

I love the idea of this service; was just discussing the need for something like this last week (was looking at the Youtube Upload Widget).

I was sad when I went to record a test video and received this message "Chrome's version of flash has a bug which prevents sound from being recorded. Disable pepper to continue."

Ugh. Disabling "pepper" probably isn't a big deal for me, but for my end users, this could be a major show stopper. :(

Hi! Thanks so much for your support.

Our recording is currently still in beta right now, but we're coding so fast that are hands our virtually bleeding. We're looking to continually improve this feature and one of the long term goals solutions we see for this is WebRTC which should be very exciting. Keep on following up and we'll be sure to have more updates soon!

It'd probably make sense for you to suggest that the user tries a different browser - like IE, Safari or Firefox for uploading. For the average user, that's a much less difficult thing to do than disabling pepper.

Can you tell me more about this "pepper" bug. I built a few video streaming/recording sites for some of my clients and I have yet to run into a case were the audio wasn't recorded. Maybe I can provide some guidance.

I'm also curious.

He might be referring to the new PepperFlash bug that makes Flash not give microphone feedback when doing the usual attach to a null NetConnection.

We've had to disable our automatic microphone detection for VideoView.com because of that one.

P.S. Do you have a twitter handle as well? I'd probably like to stay in touch as we're apparently working on similar fields.

Agree PepperFlash has some quirks, switching between the default mic and the enhanced mic (for noise cancellation) some times crashes, as well as some other odd ones. I do have twitter but I'm one of the few that don't use it (only for testing purposes :D) so best if you hit me up via email in profile.

I disabled Pepper, and now it says: Error: Your version of Flash has a bug with Retina displays which makes recording impossible.

The big problem with recording any kind of video or audio on the web is Flash. It's a nightmare with well-known _major_ bugs in Chrome (good luck clicking on "Allow" if you're a Macbook Pro with Retina display user). If you guys can find a way to (a) solve that, and (b) take away that pain for other users, then you have real value here. Seriously, I can't wait for HTML5 to be fully supported.

how about using an actual operating system? :P

Chrome's introduction of PepperFlash was just horrible.

They opened with a massive bug that crashed every webcam recording service on the internet.

When they fixed that they crashed for every service that displayed sound volume for multiple microphones.

That bug they fixed by just not giving volume feedback for microphones at all.

Sadly enough, HTML5 video recording will be quite a while out still since you'd need a reliable server to capture the stream, but none of the major provider (FMS, Wowza, Red5) have any plans for WebRTC support so far.

You can go for Lynckia, but that's about as unproven as you can get...

Note that the highlighted text in the headline and in one of the sub-headlines should be tested against the same version without highlighting, and another with a [red,blue,green] underline. I say this because this sort of highlight tends to test lower than underlines. But in your case it needs to be tested (if you haven't done already).

I found the "inverted" CSS style to be very annoying, since it looks almost exactly like text that I have selected (yes, I'm one of those compulsive text selectors).

Looks very good - just had a quick look at the REST API - is it not possible to get a full list of all videos? (sorted/paginated maybe) - I'm thinking there would be use cases where you'd upload videos in the dashboard and then import them to a website later.

Was just hoping for something like this. Totally genius -- awesome work guys!

"hey I see you played a video... here's a CTA" ... there are some alert()'s lying around in your "cases"... guessing they were meant to be removed :)

Is the USP here the video recording? If I was comparing to services like zencoder, transload.it, pandastream etc

[1] http://zencoder.com/en/ [2] https://transloadit.com/ [3] http://www.pandastream.com/

Awesome product, but holy shit are you guys expensive for anyone who does volume.

3000 'minutes' uploaded for $200 ? Tell me thats a monthly allowance and not a one time fee? You better be using some fancy CDNs and having 10 different versions of my file in different resolutions for that price.

Maybe let people opt for no transcoding to bring the price down? I would never use you guys at the current price. A few open source scripts and a dedicated server at 100tb.com is 500 times cheaper.

Let me know how your open source scripts and dedicated server work out. I'd like a great, but insanely cheap solution too.

with amazon and a bit of scripting you can get pretty far while keeping the costs low. For my company for example, I transcoded 35 000 minutes of video in 2 days for about 300 euro. Of course it took me a good week to develop the whole system but in the end it was much so cheaper than other services out there. (Zencoder, Amazon Cloud Transcoding etc.) .

Fun little use I noticed: you can upload video to framebase from the command line with a single curl command:

curl -F "file=@full-path-to-file-here" -F "token=your-app-token-here" http://api.framebase.io/video/

This technique will work for plenty of other services as well.

Looks neat. Could be a service i will use in the future. Only thing i noticed is that you use flash to record the videos. In my case, this is broken because of the peper flash player from chrome. Is it not an idea to use the getusermedia API where supported?

Great idea for a service to alleviate the pain of video uploads (& more)!

One thing that should be clear from the Pricing page but is missing though: one-time, monthly or yearly pricing? (Monthly makes the most sense but it should be said either way.)

I love projects like these. In a few minutes I can have some advanced functionality and make myself look way smarter than I am.

Just a thought for the future, perhaps come up with a solution for iPhone/iPad apps.

"Clicking on get started for free button and not typing anything in the input panel generates an DB error" -Just Saying

I would love such a service for mobile platforms. Any plan to go beyond browsers?

Yes! We're developing SDKs for iOS right now and constantly trying to improve our mobile web experience as well. In fact, with the uploader widget, if you were to open up the page on iOS 6, it should ask you if you want to record video right from your phone. It still requires more testing though.

If you want to email us at support@framebase.io, we would love to talk to you about what you'd like to see in our future mobile SDKs.

Is it compliant with HTML standards to have input type="framebase"?

Yes. Anything the browser doesn't understand for input type will be treated like a text input.

AdBlock just killed all your examples on Google Chrome, guys.

I'm not sure it is AdBlock. Whether I have it enabled or not I get the error: "Error:Chrome's version of flash has a bug which prevents sound from being recorded.". Seems like a genuine bug with the Chrome Flash player.

It is. I paused/deactivated AdBlock and it worked perfectly.

Or AdBlock just deactivates the Flash plugin, and the HTML5 video plays as the fallback?

I dont see even the flash window. So, yes, maybe just erase the whole div. I just see the gray div but not the content in it. That's all.

I keep thinking that the text "easiest" is selected. Dammit.

Trying to upload a video but it doesn't seem to register...

Gosh, this is amazing.

I'd love to see a framework like this for audio.

I'm wondering is there a similar service for audio?

"Video for PHP Developers"

whoaa!

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