We are a passionate web startup company located in the Hong Kong Science Park. You’ll be contributing to our video transcoding web service, Ankoder, using ruby on rails and Amazon S3, EC2. We’re moving fast, building valuable apps, and we’re planning big things. We’re looking for awesome software engineers to join our team.

Our engineering team is energetic, collaborative, smart, and gets things done. We develop primarily using Mac and Linux. We have a professional working environment that is also fun and friendly.

Personality

• Reliable
• Self driven
• Passionate about Web, Computing, Video and startups culture.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to design of the architecture and the development of the products and services for our new digital media solution.
• Develop, maintain, and enhance applications and services.
• Invent novel solutions to challenging problems.
• Establish engineering best practices such as code reviews, design guidelines, and check-in policies.
• Improve performance, scalability, and availability of our internal systems.
• Create tools and processes to increase the productivity of all your co-workers.
• Diagnose and debug issues in a production environment.

Required skills:

• 1-2 years demonstrated coding skills in Ruby, Java or other related programming languages.
• Strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
• Experience building data-driven services and applications.
• Knowledge of Ruby on Rails, Linux and open source technologies is highly desirable.
• Independent, energetic, highly technical, and capable of driving for results under pressure and ambiguity.
• Experience building web-based applications is a plus.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills. Chinese Mandarin proficiency is required.

Qualifications:

Education: BS degree or better in Computer Science; Masters degree preferred.

contact: job at ankoder dot com

We’re happy to feature a success story from our happy client ZozzyTV. They’ve teamed up with Vodafone in Dublin, Ireland to run a fun street-casting promotion over the holiday season. Many people believe that it will be “the annual best interactive outdoor holiday campaign”.

ZozzyTV is like “American-Idols online”, except they also have a giant LCD in the busy sections of Grafton Street, Henry Street and Temple Bar in Dublin and show videos submitted by users. If anybody wants to see himself on the LCD, all he needs to do is visit Zozzy TV’s website, participate in the activity and upload his video. Then he could be seen by tens of thousands of pedestrians.

In addition, Zozzy TV turns the video player into something like the jukebox. If users are in the vicinity, they can request their videos via a text message and the videos will be played with one hour. VentureBeat also covered their innovative campaign.

Through this novel promotion, Vodafone is picking up considerable exposure，with one in six videos providing a 30-60 second ad slot for the company. Tens of thousands of pedestrians daily are being exposed to the displays.

Of course, their video encodings are smoothly done by Ankoder. It is great to see some innovative uses of videos online as well as ‘offline’.

Last week, we were delighted to take part in the Inno Design Tech Expo held by HKTDC. We got the chance to exchange views with the most innovative companies in various industries. In addition, we made many new precious friends.

The Inno Design Tech Expo had a great list of innovative design showcase from various countries such as Sweden, Netherlands and Japan. Attendees from all around the world shown interest in our service and product. It is our pleasure to show our solutions to them and exchanges views about online video services. We feel that that the online video market in Hong Kong is still at it’s infancy. Marketers are paying more and more attention to online video because its value in business is growing significantly.

In communicating and engaging with customers, the importance of video cannot be ignored. From the users’ point of view, online video can offer them the most exciting visual experience. From the commercial point, it can help enterprises to build brand image and do brand communication. The market is influenced profoundly by word of mouth now, the company which control the power of online video will be ahead of the competition. We expect with the popularizing of online video sites, online advertising and online training will explode in the near future and in turn driving high demand for comprehensive video platforms.

Contact us if you’d like to start a trial with our latest offer.

We’re on a roll. Another member – gearboxsoft has helped us code a .NET example with our API. With the PHP example released just two days ago, together with this c# sample, we are only missing a Java example. I’m sure we’ll have sample code in all languages pretty soon.

A big thank you for the guys at Gang of Coders. They helped us with writing a PHP authentication example to our API. Hope this will kick start PHP developers to start using our service.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve installed the latest libtheora and ffmpeg2theora for transcoding to ogg videos. We really have to give a big thank you to Jan @ v2v.cc. His open source project – ffmpeg2theora has been a big gift to the adoption of ogg videos and HTML5.

Some of you may not be familiar of theora. Theora is a royalty-free, open standard, lossy video compression technology being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation alongside their other open media efforts, most notably the Vorbis audio codec and the Ogg container.

libtheora is a reference implementation of the Theora video compression format being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. Now 1.1.0 release is a big milestone, it is much improved in quality that is comparable with h.264 in many aspects. The file size has also reduced at the same quality.

For more information you can find out at http://www.theora.org/news/

What is so good about theora? It is free to use and you don’t need a Flash plugin to play the video. By default in HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5
• Google Chrome
• SeaMonkey
• Opera

For how to embed the video on your site, here’s some tips.

• Video for everybody by Camen
• HTML5 and video in email

We were delighted to be part of the Atlassian Startup Space at Web Direction South 09 expo in Sydney last week. We received great interest from the attendees, as they were mostly web developers. It is very exciting and reassuring for us to hear that video transcoding is such a pain for many companies out there.

Web Direction has grown into such a big event, now they are hosting conferences in Canada, Japan. The web community in Australia is a very passionate bunch. Around the conference, there was alot of other web related events as well and they managed to pack it into Web week Definitely should check it out again next year. And since Google Wave was sprouted from Sydney, everyone in the conference got an invite! How cool is that?

We also met other solid Aussie startups. It was great sharing experiences with other startup founders.

I also met a bunch of cool indie startup guys as well. Very useful sharing our experiences and stories.

• Agile Bench a project management tool designed to support agile software development processes
• Doculicious, an easy way to create embeddable web forms that generate PDF documents
• Hiive Systems web-based service & client tracking tool that provides professionals with access to critical client information
• Platform 46 Social Business Integrator
• Topikality topikality learns what sort of articles you like, and emails them to you
• 88 Miles making time tracking simple and quick

Since our launch, we’ve received many feature requests and questions. Not many people know about our feedback page on Uservoice. So I have added an extra link at the footer.

Please add any suggestions or problems you may have faced. We’ll attend to the problem straight away. And if you haven’t noticed, we’ve also added a real time chat support using Olark . They have a great new platform and widget, if you’re a site owner, you should check it out.

We now have clients literally in 4 countries – USA, Australia, Ireland, Italy. Let me know if I’ve left any of you out. Things are happening very quickly here. Since we were featured on AWS Blog, our signups were boosted!

Thank you for your support and feedback. I’ve compiled a short list so far, they are going into our to-do list for sure.

Q. Audio only transcoding?
A. Yes. Create a new profile and choose format as “mp3” and “novideo” in videocodec.

Q. Can you control S3 headers, particularly Cache-control and Expires headers?
A. Not yet, we’re working on that.

Q. How can I delete videos?
A. You don’t need to delete videos, we don’t store them permanently but there’s a 48 hr window for debugging, temporary backup and renecode.

Q. How can I customise remote video filename?
A. We’re working on this.

Other good suggestions as well.
- Multiple upload path per account.
- Multiple notification server per account.
- or separate development, production environment.

Chat Catcher

Thanks to our new user Sean O’Donnell, we have a new example of authentication with Python. We’ve released a Ruby on Rails plugin since our launch. Here’s another example of our key+signature based authentication in Ruby.

We’re looking for more samples in PHP, .NET and Java. Do let us know if you’ve built any.

Thanks to the release of the iPhone OS 3 back in July, HTTP based streaming was made possible. This type of streaming requires a custom encoding and segmentation setting. We’re happy to announce that Ankoder supports HTTP iPhone streaming files segmentation out of the box.

If you are not sure how HTTP streaming works, here’s a good explanation from Apple Dev Center. There’s a similar feature by Microsoft called “smooth streaming” which works with silverlight. That will be supported in the near future.

Here’s how you can transcode and segment 3 different qualities of a mp4 for iphone in one go. Before you start, of course you would need to register an Ankoder account.

Step 1. Storage Setup:

Step 2. Formats, Recipes:

• Clone your own Format:

• Format type: “mpegts”, iPhone screen size is: 480×320

• Segment the video

• Create your recipe: (or we already have one) The supported bitrates for streaming are: 100 Kbps to 1.6 Mbps
  • Low – 128 Kbps video, 64 Kbps audio
  • Medium – 500 Kbps video, 64 Kbps audio
  • High – 1000 Kbps video, 64 Kbps audio

Step 3. Upload or use API to send a download request.

Our system will automatically transcode your video, cut them up into segments, and upload them back to your server. For more information please look at our API documentation.

Here’s the result:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/iphone.stream/53.m3u8

Note, paste the link on your iPhone or on Mac, you need the iPhone SDK emulator.

For more HD video source: http://orange.blender.org/download

Related Posts:

Here’s a few good articles, credits to Carson:

• iPhone HTTP streaming with ffmpeg and open source segmenter
• iPhone Live Streaming using S3 and Cloudfront

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www.ankoder.com, an online video technology company, today launched beta trials of its “cloud based” video transcoding platform.

The service provides content publishers, CMS developers, web portals the necessary tools to quickly build, deploy and manage online video platforms.

Ankoder significantly lowers the barriers to entry for website owners with large user base looking to monetize the rapidly growing online video market.

Founder and company director Rex Chung said: “Developing a scalable encoding solution can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, never mind the untold ongoing changes in video codecs and features from new portable devices.”

“Ankoder takes the worries out of development and infrastructure setup. This frees up companies to do what they do best: focus on serving their customers.”

Free trials were opened today ahead of a formal launch of services scheduled in October 09.

With the Ankoder services, content owners and software providers can quickly integrate a powerful encoding platform to their existing services while they enjoy a flexible pay per use system with no license fee.

Ankoder is built on Amazon Web Services. It is designed to handle large and unexpected amount of videos and be able to process them in parallel. It can minimise the waiting time compared to a traditional job queuing system.

ABOUT ANKODER

Ankoder, which means “encoder”, is a cloud based video transcoding platform and product and service of Rorcraft Limited. Media companies, businesses and organizations use Ankoder to transcode videos into multiple formats suitable for web, mobile and other media devices. Founded in 2007, Ankoder is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business. For more information, visit http://www.ankoder.com

PRESS CONTACT

press@ankoder.com

Apple announced the new features of the iPhone OS 3.0, that the iPhone would be capable of streaming video and audio directly over HTTP. Apple also advertised HTTP streaming as a feature of QuickTime X, the update of its media architecture coming in Snow Leopard. What it failed to explain, at least publicly, is how this streaming would be accomplished. Fortunately, Apple submitted its proposed protocol last month to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the hopes that it will become a ubiquitous standard.

The basic mechanics involve using software on the server to break an MPEG-2 transport stream into small chunks saved as separate files, and an extension to the .m3u playlist specification (.m3u8) to tell the client where to get the files that make up the complete stream. The media player client merely downloads and plays the small chunks in the order specified in the playlist, and in the case of a live stream, periodically refreshes the playlist to see if there have been any new chunks added to the stream.

The traditional Real Time Streaming Protocol originally developed by Netscape and Real has big issues with its necessary ports blocked by routers or firewall settings, preventing a device from accessing the stream. As the standard protocol for the Web, though, HTTP is generally accessible. Furthermore, no special server is required other than a standard HTTP server, which is more widely supported in content distribution networks, and more expertise in optimizing HTTP delivery is generally available than for RTSP.

The real benefit to HTTP Live Streaming is that the server can maintain multiple versions of the clips in different formats. This allows an iPhone user with a WiFi connection to negotiate a higher quality version of the video than if only EDGE were available. Even better, the phone can renegotiate a higher or lower quality dynamically if it improves or loses signal. This enables the watcher to experience the best video quality possible at the current bandwidth available, continually optimized as new segments are requested.

Unlike Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming trojan horse for Silverlight, HTTP Live Streaming works with any playback client on any platform and does not involve a layer of DRM, although it does support encryption, allowing broadcasters to limit access to their content. Because support is built directly into the iPhone’s embedded QuickTime player, users don’t even need to download apps, content creators can simply publish their feeds within a standard website, and iPhone can access them just like a desktop client.

We’re working hard to support this feature, so look out for this in the near future.