I read in an earlier post that you folks were evaluating which codecs to support with the transcoding feature. I would imagine that the most important option for most web apps would be to convert from the various primaries (AVI, MPG, MOV) to Flash Video (FLV).

 Also, will there be a feature to generate a preview image from the transcoded file (similar to the initial still shot visible in the YouTube player)?

A final thought...please keep transcoding cheap! Anybody who plans on having any significant amount of video media uploaded and converted would have to think long and hard about just using their own server to batch the jobs if the cost is too steep.  It would be great if it was priced as affordably as the other aspects of your service.

There are many people who want encoding to FLV so we made sure this was supported along with many other codecs.  There will also be the ability to extract frames. You can define the number of frames to extract, the start time offset and the frames per second.   This way you can extract a single image or multiple from a specific offset X times per second and output them in PNG, JPG or BMP.

We are still discussing the pricing for these operations, but as always we try to give you the best price that we can.

Regards,
    Barry R.
 

 Adam,

Thanks for the feedback. Thumbnail extraction will come in the release right after we launch. We don't have a solid date but it will definitely be before the end of the year. We are still working on the pricing model for transcoding and would love to hear your thoughts. I will contact you off the list.

 

Since Adobe Flash comes with H264 and AAC encoding, will we be able to convert our videos to that format with 2-pass quality encoding? And can we see supported "source" codecs?

We are going over which codecs we will be supporting, we have default codecs setup for each major file format in the current release.  Expect some additional options for transcoding coming soon in this area.

Regards,
    Barry R.
 

Have you guys set a date for the thumbnails yet?

This will be part of our next release which is being tested right now. I cannot give a date right now for the release but it will be before the new year. Regards, Barry R.