Question

What is the best way to add video uploading, encoding and streaming functionality to my Rails app ?

I’m thinking about a mix as : Rails app + Video Online Encoder + Amazon S3. What do you think ?

For the Video Online Encoder (VOE), which one is the easier to use with Rails : heywatch, panvidea, encoding.com, pandastream, … ?

By the way, the application will allow users to play streamed videos with dynamic Texts, Schemas and Sounds added to them at the run time. There’s an example :

1. in rails app (backoffice or frontoffice) : Video upload (.mov, .avi, …)
2. VOE : video encoding in FLV format + storage in Amazon S3
3. in rails app, backoffice : in a home-made Flash application, “add” to the video a Text and a Schemas showed after 1 minute for example (informations stored in the Rails app DB).
4. in rails app, frontoffice : play the streamed video from Amazon S3 (+Cloudfront) in a home-made Flash player which show dynamicaly the Text and the Schema over the video after 1 minute of playing.

The part I really don’t understand is the FLV video Stream. I was thinking that Cloudfront could do that.

I hope I’m clear enough 😉

Thank you all for your answers !

Answer 1

Zencoder looks cool and it probably has the API support you want. Use flash for the player I’m guessing? You will need FMS or Red5 for that. Here is a link to a really simple example that transcodes something stored in S3 for you, in Ruby of course!: http://zencoder.com/docs/integration-libraries/#library