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AWS launches transcoding service a week after Microsoft goes after media biz

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:10:57 +0000

Amazon Web Services now offers transcoding services in the cloud, a product launch for the cloud computing giant that follows a week after Microsoft announced a similar (but more expansive) service in its Windows Azure cloud. AWS Elastic Transcoder will benefit companies that want to adapt their video files to a variety of consumer devices, from smartphones to big-screen TVs.

Transcoding traditionally has been done on dedicated hardware located inside the data centers and head ends of telecommunications providers and cable operators, or in the data centers of content companies and CDNs. For example, Netflix encodes each movie it has 120 times to meet the needs of all the devices it supports. But as online video becomes more popular and devices proliferate, transcoding becomes an issue for everyone, from small blogs that want to do video to Disney.

Now, instead of buying dedicated hardware and software, they can go to Amazon, which will offer folks 20 minutes of transcoding each month for free. After that, it will charge between 0.015 cents per minute to 0.036 cents per minute depending on whether the customer wants high-definition or standard definition, and where in the world the transcoding will occur.

From the Amazon release:

In addition, Amazon Elastic Transcoder provides pre-defined presets for popular devices that remove the trial and error in finding the right settings and output formats for different devices. The service also supports custom presets (pre-defined settings made by the customer), making it easy for customers to create re-useable transcoding settings for their unique requirements such as a specific video size or bitrate. Finally, Amazon Elastic Transcoder automatically scales up and down to handle customers’ workloads, eliminating wasted capacity and minimizing time spent waiting for jobs to complete. The service also enables customers to process multiple files in parallel and organize their transcoding workflow using a feature called transcoding pipelines. Using transcoding pipelines, customers can configure Amazon Elastic Transcoder to transcode their files when and how they want, so they can efficiently and seamlessly scale for spikey workloads. For example, a news organization may want to have a “high priority” transcoding pipeline for breaking news stories, or a User-Generated Content website may want to have separate pipelines for low, medium, and high resolution outputs to target different devices.

Amazon isn’t the first in the cloud encoding/transcoding market, but it does have the largest customer base in the cloud, including Netflix, which clearly delivers a lot of video. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft has launched a Media platform service that will include transcoding, aimed at giving customers all the tools it needs to deliver streaming video content online. Microsoft’s service uses the same tools it used to host the London Olympics last year. Other companies such as Encoding.com provide cloud encoding services as well.

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Big data and DNA: What business can learn from junk genes

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:34:14 +0000

The science world was rocked Wednesday by the discovery that the 80 percent of the human gene that scientists throught was “junk” actually contains genetic regulators that can lead to diseases and certain genetic traits. It’s the scientific equivalent of discovering that ugly old dresser is actually a Louis XIV original, except that in this case, that dresser would also be filled will priceless books that might provide even more discoveries.

From my perspective, what was amazing about the outcome of the ENCODE project wasn’t just the results, but the infrastructure that supported it. According to the press release discussing the findings, ENCODE generated more than 15 terabytes of raw data, and the data analysis consumed the equivalent of more than 300 years of compute time. For those living on the edge of the hyper scale world, these numbers may not be all that impressive — after all Facebook says it takes in 500 terabytes of data a day. But the ENCODE data is shared and accessed by scientists around the world.

And that’s what’s worth thinking about, as we try to build economies and organizations around big data. The ENCODE project didn’t just come up with some new truths about our genetic material: It was a global collaboration that required 32 labs to gather and perform more than 1,600 experiments on more than 147 tissue samples to generate data that would then be further used to make more discoveries.

Jim Kent, director of the UCSC Genome Browser project and head of the ENCODE Data Coordination Center laid out some of the challenges associated with making sure experiments were independent, worthwhile and still generating accurate data. From a release announcing the recent findings from ENCODE:

“For Kent and his data coordination team at UCSC’s Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, the scale of the project presented many challenges. To start with, they had to coordinate a small army of researchers who were producing data in labs around the world. “We had five data wranglers who traveled around to the labs, probably four conference calls a week at the height of it, plus large group meetings twice a year, and countless emails and Skype calls,” Kent said.”

“The management of data and the processes / QA around it are the biggest problems out there and are tough to follow. Most people struggle massively just with managing all the data, let along keeping it up to date, etc.,” said Sultan M. Meghji, a VP with Appistry, a company that manages genetic data.

The project doesn’t just offer ways to think about and organize the hunt for and use of gigantic data sets. Researchers also developed software tools to analyze their results. These include new databases for tracking specifics associating with genetic analysis such as HaploReg or RegulomeDB. There’s also a pre-configured virtual machine available designed to host and analyze data generated by the ENCODE project. And of course, the data is open for researchers and the project’s participants are actively encouraging interested parties to learn how to use the data and contribute via a portal.

So while this is a big data story, a cloud computing story and a science story, it’s also a peek at the future of collaboration and management challenges driven by our connected world. And if that’s not enough to get you excited about the project, let’s return to the science and discoveries about the secrets locked inside the genome.

“The quality and scientific depth of the data is the bigger import. As we move primarily into clinical operations, this kind of data, if it is of high quality and repeatable from a process perspective is massively useful,” Meghji said.

This article on the genetic link that could help doctors predict what antidepressants are most likely to help cure a person with depression — doing away with the trial and error approach in place today — shows what could become the future of medicine. And that’s awesome.

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Handbrake Gets 64-bit Snow Leopard Love

Liam Cassidy — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:00:31 +0000

Mac OS X is a wonder. When it comes to personal information management, entertainment and the Internet, it’s got all the basics covered. Beyond that, there are a handful of “essential” apps most Mac owners install on a new machine within minutes of booting it up for the first time. Handbrake is undoubtedly one of those essentials. And it just got a serious new upgrade.

Handbrake is a very handy (pun intended) DVD-ripping utility that converts DVDs to self-contained video files that can be played back on a computer or mobile device. (Contrary to the outright lies of major motion picture studios, there’s nothing wrong with having digital backups of movies you already own). In addition, DVDs can be converted into a number of formats, resolutions and aspect ratios. For many years, it has served as the single easiest way to get my movies off-of DVD discs and onto my iPods, iPhones and even my PSP.

The latest release, Handbrake 0.9.4, includes support for Snow Leopard, and is also available in 64-bit editions for both Leopard and Snow Leopard. It also adds the ability to include multiple subtitle tracks to exported video and a new “live preview” for viewing the likely outcome of an export before committing to a lengthy rip.

According to the release notes on the Handbrake website, the latest version includes new features like “macroblock tree rate control” and “weighted P-Frame prediction.” I’ve absolutely no idea what any of that means, and although they do provide links to explanatory articles, it made my head swim. I’ll just assume it’s all very swish and futuristic and good for my rips.

The introduction of a 64-bit version is good news for those of us using true 64-bit multi-core processors, though the performance increase is a fairly modest 10 percent. The software also supports non-DVD encoding, which is great news for those of us who do a lot of video editing. (I prefer to use Final Cut but often have to import raw data into iMovie only to export it out to a format Final Cut will accept. Handbrake won’t cut out this extra conversion step, but it performs far faster than the monolith that is iMovie and provides more flexibility in export formats.)

It’s not all about video, either. Handbrake offers great audio encoding options, including the newly-added ability to encode AAC using OS X’s Core Audio (which means far higher quality than was possible previously).

Of course, there are a lot of other software titles that offer similar functionality (Aimersoft’s popular DVD Ripper, for instance) but Handbrake is free. Although this means it has no official support, it does enjoy an active and enthusiastic user community so if you get stuck you won’t have far to go to find answers and help.

If you are using a 64 bit machine and want to get the full 64-bit goodness from Handbrake, you’ll need the 64-bit version of VLC Player, the latest nightly builds of which can be found here. (Please note that VLC Player 64-bit is beta software and as such offers no end-user support.) Handbrake 0.9.4 is available from the Handbrake website now.

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