Question

My question regards the encoder file and how can i allow customer to upload the file into my server and which they can then view. I am implementing html5 to start off, and want to allow customer to upload there file mov, avi, etc… Once upload i am assuming I must make it readable and if at the end this doesn’t work do a flash app. I am wondering is there a converter that can do this in the fly in rails world or there is no solution yet?

Answer 1

By far the easiest way to encode a video to a viewable format is to use a service to do it for you. You can do it with ffmpeg if you want to do it yourself.

For a service to do your encoding, I would recommend zencoder for the following reasons:

• They have a pretty nice ruby gem
• They have extremely good debugging tools
• They have an API builder so you can build your requests through their website before using it in your code reducing the feedback loop for the request.

There are other services that I have used such as encoding.com and Panda but I find Zencoder to be consistently the best for encoding that is priced on encoding time.

Using the following options (for Zencoder):

      :format => "mp4",
      :public => public,
      :video_codec => "h264",
      :audio_codec => "aac"

Will work on most modern devices (Android devices, iDevices, Safari, Chrome, IE9+ and Flash)