Quote:
Originally Posted by michael.kickass
in my opinion, ffmpeg is all what you need! it's able to convert any file extention to any file extention.
why should you pay for anything you could get for free?
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There are a number of reasons to pay for a service like zencoder instead of using ffmpeg but this obviously depends on your use case.
For me, I enjoy being able to encode more than one video at a time and not have to worry about queues. I buy several thousand videos, have them sent to my colo partner, have them mount the drive and simply let zencoder handle the encoding. A batch of 1000 videos averaging 20-30 minutes will be complete in a day or a little over. Using ffmpeg this would take considerably longer.
FFMPEG isn't a set and forget type utility. When one needs to support various non-standard formats, files and even settings, it pays to have someone, who knows what they are doing, on board to constantly help fine tune. Using a service negates any need for this.
In my case, ffmpeg wasn't free. I paid people to set it up, I paid someone to fix it when a file type failed to convert, I paid for two servers, I paid to have those two servers hosted.
Like I said though, it does depend on your use case and more importantly how comfortable you are handling video. I personally prefer to outsource this part of my business and let people who know video handle it for me.