It was some days ago when i was contacted by one of the visitors of this blog in order to create a "black box" solution to solve the video encoding part of a video sharing website similar to youtube.com.

As you maybe know, i have posted some months ago a really basic script to automate some of the tasks, but, what about integration with your actual website framework ? what about queue management, what about multi-server encoding environment ?

Those are all the usual questions when a potential customer calls, so i spent some days developing a complete black-box solution for this issue, using all open-source software, with the following features.

• Fully automatic video encoding queue management.
• Support for 1 to n encoding nodes with fully automatic transaction control (still in beta-testing).
• Support for the following video formats: Windows Media, Quicktime, DV, Avid DV, DivX, xVid and almost any imaginable format (any format supported by mplayer is actually 100% supported)
• Support for HE-AAC audio (Stereo near-CD quality sound at 48kbps).
• Fully automatic thumbnail generation in 3 different positions of the video stream, supported output formats are JPG, PNG and GIF.
• Fully automatic metadata injection, including all the popular "iTunes like" tags.
• Fully automatic iPod Touch / iPhone compatible stream generation.
• Support for more than 1 output format (managed from a presets file).
• Fully automatic Pixel and Display aspect ratio correction for proper video resizing and scaling.
• Possibility to select how many CPU cores to use for the encoding process (only on multicore cpu's)

There are a several more features that I'm still developing. If you are interested and you want more details, you can contact me at: diego (at sign here) massanti.com. I don't bite

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