Beginning in January 2008, Zencoder.tv, an American video encoding and transcoding software opened the domain.
The function of the site was to offer reliable and customer-specific video transcoding software at a good price.
Software operation
The operation of the software was described on the website in the following steps:
- Installing Zencoder on Amazon EC2, or on the user’s own hardware (the solo license run on a virtual machine or on a single server; Zencoder Pro version could be distributed on multiple devices)
- Sending videos to Zencoder (using API or installing Zencoder on a user’s server)
- Processing the uploaded files by the software (Zencoder handled transcoding, errors, scaling, and queuing)
- Storing final processed videos (on a private file server, Amazon S3, CDN, etc.)
Zencoder Advantages
For those who wanted to see what were main benefits of using the software, the website enlisted a few advantages:
- the same cost no matter the number of videos processed per day
- easy integration through REST web services
- risk reduction – verified and reliable system
- highly scalable
- complete control over codecs and output formats
Zencoder Features
Those who wanted to get familiar with more characteristics of Zencoder could read more about some software’s features:
Scaling: Transcoding jobs can be distributed across numerous transcoding servers. Pro license allowed scale to 12 or more transcoding servers which could be a mix of dedicated servers and Amazon EC2 instances.
Flexible Hosting Options: Zencoder was able to be run entirely on the user’s own dedicated hardware, on Amazon EC2 account, or on a mixture of these.
Reliable: Zencoder was described as extremely reliable, such that it was almost improbable to lose the jobs processed via the software. The user could kill some pieces of the system, and upon coming back online, the job list would be automatically rebuilt.
Compatibility: Zencoder supported hundreds of input and output formats, as well as many transcoding tools. If a format was not supported by the software, the user could process the file by hand and next upload it directly to the Zencoder Dashboard for seamless handling of edge cases.
Transcoding Recipes: The software could leverage the full power of, e.g. On2 Fix Engine, mencoder, or ffmpeg. The user could supply their own recipes, or just use optimized recipes of the software.
Web Dashboard: Users could view jobs classified as waiting, in progress, or completed. There were reports, statistics, resubmitted jobs, manually uploaded replacement files, and priority of queued jobs.
Easy Integration: Integration with Zencoder was possible simply through API, using REST web services. Users have access to helper libraries to find instructions on how to make integration
Cost Effective: The price of the software was lower than custom-built solutions.
Technology Agnostic: Zencoder worked with all applications able to communicate via HTTP (written in Java, NET, Ruby, PHP, or others).
Customizable: The software could be customized according to the user’s particular needs either by the Zencoder team or the user’s own developers.
Zencoder Pricing
There were two types of Zencoder licenses that users could choose from:
Zencoder Solo – $8,500 USD – ideal for low-volume use, run on a single EC2 instance or a single server.
Zencoder Pro – $13,500 USD – fully-scalable, full-featured, highly scalable, and reliable, Zencoder Pro enabled 4 CPUs for video processing, from 1 to 4 servers, or 4 EC2 instances with the possibility to upgrade to support additional video processing nodes.
Both options required a one-time license fee.
The website ended at the end of September 2019. The software is still being used.