Zencoder is a cloud-based video encoding platform developed by Brightcove, designed to facilitate the creation and delivery of high-quality video content to a global audience.
What Zencoder Does
Zencoder is tailored for anyone needing to transcode video and audio files quickly and reliably. It supports a wide range of input and output formats, making it an ideal solution for publishers, broadcasters, and individuals looking to deliver content across various devices, including smartphones, web platforms, and living room devices.
Key Features and Functionality
Fast and Reliable Transcoding
Zencoder boasts extremely fast transcoding speeds, often encoding video faster than real-time, even for HD quality content. This is backed by a 99.9% uptime guarantee, ensuring that your encoding jobs are completed efficiently and reliably.
Context-Aware Encoding
One of the standout features of Zencoder is its Emmy® Award-winning Context-Aware Encoding technology. This capability delivers improved compression and adaptive bitrate streaming, reducing bandwidth, storage, and encoding costs while maintaining high video quality.
Broad Format Support
Zencoder supports a wide variety of container formats, audio and video codecs, and streaming protocols. This includes formats like MP4, FLV, WMV, WebM, and codecs such as H.264, H.265, MPEG 4, Theora, VP8, and VP9. It also outputs streams in HLS, MSS, and MPEG-DASH, ensuring compatibility with a broad range of devices.
Advanced Video Processing
The platform offers extensive video processing capabilities, including clipping and cropping, extracting and inserting subtitles and closed captions, handling multichannel audio, and applying AES-128 encryption and DRM. Additionally, Zencoder can intelligently rotate video from smartphones and correct audio/video sync issues, saving users time and effort.
Easy Integration
Zencoder features a well-documented API, an easy-to-use API request builder, and integration libraries that allow users to integrate the platform with their applications in a matter of hours, not weeks. This streamlined process is supported by world-class support, ensuring a smooth and extendable solution.
Multiple Outputs and Notifications
Users can generate multiple outputs from a single input file, which is particularly useful for delivering content in various formats. Zencoder also provides API notifications to keep users informed about the status of their encoding jobs.
User-Friendly Interface
While Zencoder is primarily an API, it also includes a user-friendly UI that offers account settings, a dashboard for recent job results, and an API Request Builder to help users get started without needing to write code.
In summary, Zencoder is a powerful and flexible cloud-based video encoding solution that combines speed, reliability, and extensive format support with advanced video processing capabilities and easy integration, making it an excellent choice for anyone looking to deliver high-quality video content efficiently.