Way back in 2008 we were battling away with a custom install of FFmpeg on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are really pedantic about video encoding so we had a long list of requirements.
Mid-way through the process of tweaking this set-up a number of software-as-a-service solutions specialising in video transcoding popped up.
Ankoder, built by the guys from RoRCraft was one of these.
When we first tried Ankoder it was working … but it was a little raw.
Sometimes it wouldn’t do what you wanted. This was mostly due to the fact that the videos we were uploading were in a format that Ankoder didn’t support yet.
The other issue was Ankoder’s backend, it was a little buggy and lacked some of the features we needed.
So we held off of using it back then because competitors such as Encoding.com and later HDCloud seemed to offer a more stable solution.
That said, Ankoder was still very new and the excellent support from the founder of RORCraft, Rex, meant this was a transcoding option we definitely needed to monitor.
So we checked back in on Ankoder recently and were shocked to see how much it had evolved.
All of the “missing” features we had been looking for were there and more importantly they all worked well.
We did not have any of the issues we had before and the general usability of the back-end was great.
Following these enhancements we are really happy with Ankoder and will certainly be using them in the future.
Ankoder works through REST API which allows you to integrate it easily. There are some wrappers already written for different languages so chances are that half the work of integrating Ankoder is already done.
What’s more the pricing is transparent and fair.
Bottom line, all of the encoding solutions that run on AWS do a job, and do it well.
The way to determine the right provider for you is down to pricing and ease of integration.
We are really happy with Ankoder on both of these points and the great support/accessibility of the founder and CEO means we feel comfortable recommending this as a solution you should definitely look into too.