How To Replace a $600 Piece of Software with 100 Lines of Ruby

How To Replace a $600 Piece of Software with 100 Lines of Ruby(blog.wekeroad.com)

11 points by batasrki 15 years ago | 9 comments

vgurgov 15 years ago |

been there, after tens of experiments like that and using stuff like pandastream I ended up using zencoder.com. reasons?

1) its FAST(are you seriously explect someone will wait 5-40 mins on your site while vid is encoding?). 2) ffmpeg doesnt support some weird non-open source codecs that users keep sending to our site. 3)it just works. always. and takes much less than 100 lines to hook.

So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines.

jamesbritt 15 years ago | |

"So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines."

Sorenson Squeeze. It's right in the article.

Now, whether this Ruby code replaces all of what Sorenson Squeeze does is another matter. (I'm betting the answer is "No." http://www.sorensonmedia.com/quality-video-encoding/details/)

ffmpeg is pretty sweet, but I've run into problems converting one or another video (swf, for example) so as you've noted it won't solve everyone's conversion issues.

robconery 15 years ago | | |

No - it doesn't replace all of it. Just the parts that I need. As I mention Squeeze is a fine tool but I don't need integration with Sorenson's hosting platform, and you can pretty much write whatever workflow you need in Ruby.

So I take it back - I do think this replaces Sorenson pretty handily :)

robconery 15 years ago | |

As I mention in the article, for Zencoder to work it has to upload your file. We encode from a single master which is usually well over a gig (uncompressed, fast render from our editor).

It takes a few hours to get that single file up to anywhere online. Rather than do that, I'd rather push the smaller files individually and pay nothing for it.

Make sense? And the $600 of software is Sorenson Squeeze.

ilya_b 15 years ago |

It's just like "Replacing the blog software with HTML file I created myself with Notepad". Sometimes it will work, sometimes it wont.

If you will need two or more encoding jobs running in parallel, or to push video properties for each file to the site, you will get into trouble very soon, and 100 lines will grow to 10000.

burgerbrain 15 years ago |

The short version: guy wraps FFMPEG with a little script and suddenly thinks himself to be gods gift to man.

He didn't produce high value software ,the guys who wrote the software he used did.

JoeAltmaier 15 years ago | |

Not fair. Takes all kinds of software. The packages he ref'd were supposed to manage the process, but didn't deliver for $600. His script Did do what he needed.

Its an argument for homebrew over bloated packages, at least when dealing with process. And it was a great tutorial on Ruby for managing that.

burgerbrain 15 years ago | | |

I was refering to FFMPEG, not the various ruby packages he used. All he really did was wrap FFMPEG with a script that called it with predefined arguments and kick it off to S3. He could have seen the same dramatic improvement with a handful of lines of bash.

Probably worth noteing that he doesn't even seem to know how his own script works. He was puzzled that it was burning all of his CPUs without him having to make it do that, when that is exactly the behavior you would expect.