Where your source video is located. This can be directly from your hard drive, an FTP/SFTP location or your Rackspace Cloud Files container.

What formats you want your video encoded into.  You can use our preset encoding profiles or use the dozens of encoding controls available to generate as many output versions as you require whether it’s different formats, sizes, or bitrates.  Additionally, we can generate thumbnail still images at different points within the video.

Web Interface: A simple browse and upload feature available via our web interface allow easy access to test our service, experiment with settings and enables you to upload an individual video from your desktop.

Desktop Application: Our Adobe Air Desktop Application is available for both the MAC and PC and allows you to upload and manage transcoding jobs on your desktop. This is a useful tool to use for large source video files as you can easily pause and resume uploads.

XML API: The Encoding.com API is our most sophisticated integration method and allows you to seamlessly integrate cloud-based transcoding services directly into your own applications. Common use cases include user generated video sites, premium video portals, content management systems, and desktop applications. The API offers sophisticated features like realtime job status updates and a XML call back to notify you when a job is complete.

Good FLV (H.263) This is the first generation FLV codec which offers fast encode time, universal compatibility with all versions of Flash, but does not offer the highest quality when compared to VP6 or H.264 codecs. Use the "Flash up to 9" encoding output option to generate this format with Encoding.com

Better FLV (VP6) This is a proprietary FLV codec which offers better quality than H.263. Use the "VP6" encoding output option to generate this format with Encoding.com. Both Height and Width (HxW) must be a multiple of 16 when using the VP6 codec. For example 320x240 are both divisible by 16.

Best .MOV/FLV/.MP4 (H.264) The new developing standard in Internet and mobile video, H.264 has been adopted as the standard for the BlueRay player, Apple iPhone/iPod, and is rapidly gaining penetration as the standard for Internet video. H.264 produces high quality video with reasonable file sizes but average encode times are generally longer than FLV or VP6. Currently, its main drawback is that it is only supported in Flash Player 9 which currently has a 96-97% adoption rate among mature markets. Use the "Flash 9 H.264" encoding output option to generate this format with Encoding.com

Advanced CloudFiles Integration Using the web interface, watch folder or API, you can specify your CloudFiles account as either source or destination locations. Please see our collection of help articles on using CloudFiles with Encoding.com.

Automatic CloudFiles CDN Enabled Distribution With Limelight Networks’ service, Cloud Files brings a powerful and easy way to publish content over a world-class, industry leading CDN. A Cloud Files user automatically gets access to this network. Users simply have to mark containers for publishing to CDN and they are readily accessible through the Limelight Networks CDN. The propagation of content to the edge locations is done automatically behind the scene. Users do not have to plan or write any new code to utilize this facility. This workflow is a perfect compliment to Encoding.com as encoded videos can be sent directly to CDN enabled Cloud Files containers automatically producing a http streaming URL to the video. In The Rackspace web control panel, it is a matter of creating a Container (the storage compartment for data), uploading Objects (the files to serve over CDN), and marking the Container as “public”. The Container is then assigned a unique URL which can be combined with Object names to embed in web pages, email messages, blog posts, etc. For example, you could encode a video with Encoding.com and have it sent directly to a Container called “video”. When this Container is published, it will be assigned a unique URL like “http://c0000532.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com″ You could then publish a CDN enabled public link like “http://c0000532.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/my_movie.flv.”. When that link is accessed, the video is automatically streamed using HTTP progressive from the CDN; it’s that simple!

No Bandwidth Costs Because we use the Rackspace Cloud servers for for video processing, if you store your source video within CloudFiles, and use the private CloudFiles interface, you will not be charged bandwidth to your Rackspace Cloud account for transferring to and from Encoding.com. As an added bonus you will not be charged for any ingress (only egress) traffic on the Limelight content delivery network.

Speed The media upload and download time from your Rackspace Cloud Files container, Cloud Servers, Rackspace Managed Hosting dedicated servers, or the Limelight CDN network to our processing system on CloudServers is lightening fast because it does not travel over the public internet.

Many of you have already invested in your internal hardware/software encoding infrastructure and may wonder why change. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? Your marketing VP approves an MRD requiring all content to be available for the iPhone… yesterday. Your head of sales delivers several new distribution deals all with various and stringent specifications [think Hulu] but your CEO has frozen your CAPEX budget. Or, your PR firm lands a feature story on the Morning Show next week announcing your funniest Twitter moment video contest. If the video production system breaks down, you know where the fingers will be pointed.

You are in the business of providing engaging video programming and delivering a seamless user experience. A robust outsourced cloud-based encoding solution can further automate your workflow and free up valuable resources to focus on feature and performance enhancements: player customization, content targeting, social media and community-building tools, language localization, and so much more.

Encoding Software Choices: There are a variety of open source and paid encoding software packages on the market from which to choose. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks depending on the video use case. Encoding.com maintains dozens of separately compiled encoding engines and makes them all available via our simple integration methods. So, you can choose what format you want without having to worry about which encoding software is best suited for which job.

Cloud Integration: Take encoding software and throw it on CloudServers… sounds easy right? Not quite. We have found that the algorithm that runs CloudServers is is one of the most critical and complicated components to our platform. While it’s simple enough to run software on one CloudServer, in the world of computing intensive video encoding, it is common to have sporadic needs for computing resources to power your encoding jobs. Let’s say you have a large legacy content library to bring live by a looming deadline, or your user video uploads spike one day. To efficiently manage the huge swings in transcoding requirements, we have developed a sophisticated dynamic algorithm that intelligently scales up the CloudServers platform as you send more jobs to the system, and then intelligently turns off those instances to save costs when the jobs are complete.