Zencoder
Team Members
- brandonarbini
- fowlduck
- Heff
- Jon Dahl
What
ZenVDN is an easy to use video delivery network.
ZenVDN allows you to publish video online. Upload a file, and ZenVDN creates high quality versions of your file that you can embed on your site or share directly.
ZenVDN encodes your videos to support web and mobile video devices including iPhone, then automatically delivers the appropriate video file and player.
ZenVDN lets you transcode and host your video at the 1280x720 HD video frame size.
ZenVDN uses a global content delivery network, meaning your video is hosted in cities all around the world. This ensures fast start and download times for your local and international viewers.
Where
- Entry URL:
- http://zenvdn.r09.railsrumble.com
- Info / Screencast URL:
- http://cdn.zenvdn.com/screencast.mov
How
Ruby and Rails (of course)
amazon cloudfront (CDN)
flixcoud (video transcoding)
rails_templates
RDiscount
ruby-openid
Configatron
Forgery
attr_encrypted
eigenclass
encryptor
factory_girl
Shoulda
will_paginate
Formtastic
Crack
FlixCloud Gem
http_client
AASM
AWS-S3
Flowplayer
Uploadify
jQuery
jQuery-UI
qTip
Selectbox
Clippy
acl_system2
active_presenter
Bootstrapper
Delayed Job
jRails
open_id_authentication
Paperclip
permanent_records
restful_authentication
Squirrel
ssl_requirement
Apache
Passenger
Capistrano
MySQL
Comments
Very nice user experience overall. Although the interface was simple, it seemed well thought-out and cleanly implemented. The non-blocking upload was a nice (albeit probably essential) feature. I hope this becomes a successful business for you!
More important pr0n innovations. FREE THE PR0NS!
Great web application! I love the ease of use and the UI.
Very useful application. Very easy to use. Great UI. I have already used this to help prepare the message at our church on Sunday!
Hi everyone. Thanks for all of the kind words and excellent feedback. We actually had a blast competing this year and are extremely happy with what we accomplished. We have some big plans for Zencoder, Flix Cloud, and now ZenVDN. We are checking the rankings page obsessively and are so excited when we move up! We really appreciate all of votes. Thanks!
Great work!
wow, slowly climbing
This is simply stunning guys. There are some minor UI quirks but this is, in my opinion, probably the most polished app in the entire competition. Everything works as advertised and it’s a fantastic user experience. Great work.
I’ve used FlixCloud in the past and having never done any video stuff previously I was able to get uploading, transcoding, and playing integrated in CaféCourses in one night. I can attest to its ease of use and certainly see this as being doable in 48 hours by the creators of the service.
I don’t have any videos to upload, so I wasn’t able to test the actual features. If your application does what the video says it does, it has ENORMOUS potential as a revenue generating tool. Great job!
Appearance/UI: 4/5
Between ZenVDN and AlertMe.tv, ddark background with fuzzy background images seems to be the style for video sites. :) That style works well here. The overall appearance and UI are good and make it feel like a complete, professional level app.
A few examples of things I like about the Appearance/UI:
A couple examples of things I did not like about the Appearance/UI:
Completeness: 4/5
I’m impressed by the completeness of data available and tracked and with the standalone player feature. The stats tab’s graphs make ZenVDN feel complete. The personalized, standalone player also brings some completeness points. There’s lots more that makes it complete. It’s just amazing the amount of features you got in place during such a short time.
Innovation: 4/5
Not an innovative idea on the face of it, but I give you props for taking on such a big challenge in the Rumble and for making what’s a complex offering easy to use. A bump up for the standalone, personal player url and the simple sign up process without major account setup. I’ve dealt with several other HD transcoding and hosting services and have found them very protective of their bandwidth until you sign on the dotted line. It’s nice to see a more open method to get HD video online and easily accessible to viewers. You should somehow make more clear the benefits of ZenVDN vs. YouTube or viddler-for-business.
Usefulness: 3/5
- @smeade
Great app, industrial strength, looks great!
Fantastically fully featured, fun, fulfilling, functional, and best of all free.
What an awesome application and concept! The app is very nicely designed and easy to navigate, love it!
cool appearance but not innovation … i love youtube
I’m more than impressed. Like some of the other judges said, the fact that you guys could put this together in less than 48 hour is beyond me. As far as some of the innovation conversation, I’d say this is a new product. Working with http://www.conversantlife.com, we try to post a new video each at least weekly, and being able to have options for quality and HD, as well as statistics in terms of who is viewing and when is a package that would serve our company well. Additionally, the fact that it’s unlabeled is a new feature.
Over all, I’d say this is a great app. It’s clean, absolutely beautiful, and has a real sense of inventiveness.
This seems like an amazing package guys, and to have set it up in such a short time is remarkable. Good luck,
Thanks for the positive feedback cmelbye! :)
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for taking the time to be a judge and we’re glad you liked the homepage. We think it’s a rather unique concept too. :)
To answer your question about quality, our idea with ZenVDN was to take the thought out of quality and formats, letting you worry about content instead. To do this we provide multiple versions of your video at optimum settings and formats for multiple sizes and devices. We really wanted to outdo the competition, where only a couple sizes are provided and branded video players are required.
Concerning your question of distribution, everything is done through Amazon CloudFront which works seamlessly with S3. This allows your videos to start playing more quickly and download faster.
Because you’re uploading directly to S3, there’s really not anything we can do about the upload speeds you experienced. Your upload speed is affected by your file size, your internet connection, and Amazon S3.
As far as the flow not working further, I’m not really sure what you mean. I attempted to investigate your issue but didn’t find anything to indicate something was broken. Depending on your file size, transcoding can often take some time. You can see each output video’s status in the lower, right-hand corner of the video page.
Thanks again for taking the time to be a judge! :)
This application is incredible. The easiness of use and the statistics would be very useful to webmasters that aren’t able to do the video conversions and the handling of the CDN themselves. Good job, and best of luck with this application post-rumble!
I really like the homepage and it’s a unique concept – though benefits of post uploading (namely how distribution, quality, etc work) are not totally clear. After uploading a couple videos, the flow did not work further. Uploading of videos was also quite slow.
Thanks guys! Also, really, thanks for being judges. We were calculating at the office here how much time it would take to judge the amount of apps each judge has been assigned and it just seems like a LOT of work, for free, that is being volunteered. We most definitely appreciate it. :)
Thanks for the explanatory comments. They really helped me take another look at your app and admire your accomplishment.
I think this is an amazing feat of gluing together existing tools and services into a coherent application. I like the business model that you hint at, allowing 10 videos/month, 100/minutes streaming for free, and charging for premium service. I could see many sites and services relying on an app like this.
Awesome!
Actually, it does mention FlixCloud and Amazon CloudFront now. :)
Hi Obie,
As you can see, we were docked for innovation by Bruno as well. We’re aware of other apps that provide similar services but aren’t aware of any that provide the exact services we’re providing, namely direct access to the videos and encoding to many formats, including HD. Add on top of that an unbranded, free player to be used, views stats, and a simple process, and you have a unique service. Many others providing similar services require you to deal with sales people and have big barriers to entry. Ours doesn’t.
You aren’t the first person to be skeptical about this being done in 48 hours, and I can understand the skepticism with how much it does. We were shocked we got so much done in such little time too.
What we don’t mention above is that we’re using the FlixCloud service. We wrote this service and we wrote the gem (although the developer who integrated with the service during the rumble had never used either). Combine that with our open source rails template and you have a lot done already. The rest of it becomes just interface and glue.
As far as what CDN we’re using, it’s Amazon Cloudfront which is really, really simple to use.
So, looking it all over, you can see we have all these other services doing the heavy lifting and we just integrated them.
Very clean and very nice. Worked as advertised too, which is a huge plus. On the other hand, doesn’t seem innovative and my cynical side wonders how much of this was really done before the 2 days. It’s also hard to tell what CDN they’re actually using.
Beautiful design. Very impressive demo video on the homepage. The service is very useful for small companies looking for an easy way to encode and distribute videos.
Excellent job.
Talk about ambitious – building a video delivery network for the Rumble is crazy! Or so I thought before I started using the app. You guys have done an amazing job.
I’m not a huge fan of the black form fields with thick borders, but that’s a relatively minor concern. The color scheme in general is very tech/video-oriented, which fits nicely with your functionality. Once in the site, the UI is clean, and packs a lot of information into the available space.
I never received the activation emails for my accounts, which seems like an oversight of some sort. That meant, however, that I wasn’t able to fully use the site, because I couldn’t log back in – particularly problematic when my browser crashed during a (small – 2.9MB) video upload. Playing around within the after-registration account pages, however, everything looked good – embed codes, stats, difference encodings, it was all there. It would be nice to have some estimated time of processing, though – I had to keep refreshing the screen to see that my sample movie was still pending.
I’m not really up on the online video delivery market, but I have to say that picking this particular project for the Rumble is definitely original, so you all score major points there. I can’t think of a better illustration of the power of Ruby and various web services than building this in two days.
Again, not being too in-tune with the existing market, it’s hard for me to say how useful this site would be. I don’t upload a lot of video, so it wouldn’t be a frequent destination by any means. It would be helpful to see a comparison between ZenVDN and the alternatives (whatever they might be).
Overall: wow!