We take the view in the challenge dot com that it’s best to provide people with more than one way to access your content. For video encoding service, we have encoding dot com. So we offer the streaming version of our content which we generally do via YouTube, largely because we can get Google to pay for the bandwidth. We at web video production Melbourne offer three versions of a downloadable version of the video, an HD version, an SD version and an iPHone version. Really they’re all MP4files, those downloadable versions.
The only true difference between them is the pixel proportion of the product. So our standard HD is a 1280 x 720 HD video which is commonly known as a 720p video. If you want to have an HD button on YouTube for your content, you should upload at least 720p as your HD upload. If you upload less than that, YouTube does not give you an HD option on your channel.
Our SD version is 960 x 540 and the iPhone version is 540 x 272. The only other thing that we change between those various versions is the video bit rate. Our HD product, I generally have it about 1000k per second, the SD version 500k per second and the iPhone version 250k per second. That pretty much gives us a pretty good version for each of those platforms.
In the past, we used VisualHub to do all those conversions and it performed completely magnificently. Even a number of internet marketing reviews on products testify to that. This year we’ve decided to go to an online service called encoding.com. It’s a paid service but I believe it’s reasonably inexpensive. There are two different pricing platforms. You can either sign up for a monthly charge and they have got varied different plans or you can buy credit and pay at the rate of about $2 per Gb. re the conversion.
Video encoding service has numerous alternative ways of interfacing, so you can either have an API access to the service. They have an AIR customer, an Adobe AIR client which works ok, it’s not the option I prefer to use. Or they have a web interface and they have what’s commonly known as a watch folder. It is the watch folder service that we utilize. What the watch folder does, it permits you to set up an FTP location somewhere on one of your domains where you can upload a file into that location and I’m generally uploading our HD version, our best quality version.
Then encoding.com will recognize that file is there. It scans that location every five minutes, it does the various encodings and we do those three encodings and then uploads the file back to another location. We’re uploading it to an S3 location. The thing that really benefits with this video encoding service is their server farm is so powerful that it does the encodings way faster than you could ever do on your desktop platforms even if you’ve got Mac Pros. This is a great advantage especially when you are up to web video marketing.The other thing is their pipe, their online connection between the encoding service and S3 is a massive pipe.