November 22, 2010
Major Improvement to Error Message System
When encoding videos, errors will occur. This is an unfortunate fact of life. When they do occur, the error messages should be useful and offer specific suggestions about how to resolve the issue. Encoding.com maintains many open source and commercial encoding engines and we have been less than impressed with the quality and consistency in the error messages that they all return. Where there is pain, there is opportunity. Since we see the error messages from so many encoding engines in such high volumes, we felt we were in a unique position to innovate in this area by providing an Error Message Logic Layer in between our users and the encoding engines. This is an important and ongoing project with which we have prioritized going forward. That said, we have taken a big first step towards providing Encoding.com customers useful error messages that actually help quickly identify an error and offer suggestions about how best to resolve it. The first phase of this project is now live on our platform and has 3 main components:
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The top 100 error messages have been rewritten – We analyzed the most frequently occurring and problematic error messages from 10 million encoding jobs and rewrote them to be more informative.
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New error message suggestions – For each of our top 100 error messages, we added a specific suggestion field that compliments the error message by offering advice about how best to resolve. In the Encoding.com client interface, you can see the new error messages and suggestions by using the tool tip next to the error message. Also included in this tool tip is a new “Find Solution” link which will automatically search our knowledge base for more information related to the error message. If you are using the Encoding.com API, the new error messages and suggestions will be sent in the notification post in the ErrorDescription and ErrorSuggestions fields.
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New error message codes and error messages categories. To provide a foundation for a strong error messaging system, we have segmented error codes into four main categories. This will make the error messages easier to classify as well as allow our API customers to take specific actions programatically in their software based on a specific error message that was returned.
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ECOM00000 – Unknown errors
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ECOM000xx – General errors
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ECOM001xx – Encoding errors
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ECOM002xx – File access errors (download, upload, etc)
Multiple Outputs in a single Watch Folder
Ask and you shall receive. One of the top requested features from our clients has been the ability to configure a watch folder to encode into multiple output formats. Previously, customers would have to create a new watch folder for each output format they required. Now, a watch folder can be configured to watch a source location and automatically and generate an unlimited number of output formats similar to our API. IMPORTANT NOTE: If only one output task is configured in a watch folder, we will maintain the current watch folder’s naming convention. If more than one output task is configured in a watch folder, we ill append the task ID to the file name of the output. For example: /yourvideoname_taskid.mp4
Create Thumbnails as a percentage of video length
Now we have two ways to specify where in the video we extract a thumbnail image. You can specify an exact time stamp within the video in the format HH:MM:SS:MS, or you can specify a percentage within a video in the format 1-100. The latter version is especially useful when you do not know the specific length of the video prior to sending it to us for encoding. To use this feature, simply specify the percentage in the thumbnail <time> field.
Setting S3 permissions with the AWS canonical user ID
We have now added support for an AWS canonical user ID when setting permissions for your Amazon S3 bucket. This allows you to set permissions for a S3 bucket without sending us your private key which is a much more secure and efficient way to control the ACL permissions. To use a canonical user ID, simply append &canonical_id=CANONICAL_USER_ID to your S3 destination. For example:
http://bucketname.destination.s3.amazonaws.com/filename.mp4?acl=public-read&canonical_id=CANONICAL_USER_ID
Setting custom S3 content types
The “Content-Type” of a video is an important and sometimes required MIME type for streaming video. Now you can set the content-type parameter of a video before sending it to Amazon by appending &content_type= to your S3 destination. For example:
http://dbucketname.destination.s3.amazonaws.com/no_ext_file_with_cont_type?acl=public-read&content_type=video/mp4
And many small Bug Fixes
Fixed issue in which VP6 Flix does not encode video with Dolby 5.1 Audio
Fixed a bug in which a thumbnail was not created if after the 180s time mark of the video
Validation error on H.264 advanced encoding parameters deblockalpha or deblockbeta
Fixed iPhone Streaming bug when FTP is a destination
November 11, 2010
Encoding.com is growing quickly. To ensure that we can continue to provide the best support possible, we’ve doubled our team at HQ in San Francisco with an emphasis on support staff.
We all know video encoding is complicated — part art and part science. With so my different formats and all the related parameters, there are many points of failure. From day 1, our mission has been to dramatically simplify this complex world so that you can focus on content creation, user experience and other components of the video workflow.
With our beefed up team, you can expect faster support response times, much improved technical and API documentation, a more user-friendly knowledge base and a relentless pursuit to make your lives easier.
Please continue to provide feedback and ideas so that we can better help you.
Thanks,
- the Encoding.com team
November 10, 2010
We recently presented a webinar to Rackspace customers on how to link your Rackspace Cloud account with Encoding.com to create a simple, powerful, scalable and cost-effective video platform. In the presentation, we provide very specific step-by-step instructions to get you going.
The Rackspace team just posted the webinar so it’s now available for everyone to view.
Click here to view: http://bit.ly/b0iEBM Hope this helps!
November 01, 2010
We ordered a big batch of super cool American Apparel Encoding.com t-shirts and want to give them away to all of our Max customers as a way of saying thank you for your business. If you want a t-shirt and are presently a Max customer in good standing. Please send us an email with your size request (SMALL/MEDIUM/LARGE.) and a current mailing address.
Thanks again for your continued support!
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