Encoding

Service Overview

Rambla provides a complete online video encoding platform, allowing you to handle your encoding tasks efficiently and cost-effectively. As a Rambla customer, you get full access to this platform without setup charge or monthly recurring fee: credits are charged on a per-encoding basis, which depends on the CPU-usage needed for encoding your file.

Our encoding platform is capable of converting virtually all popular source media formats into the target format(s) of your choice - video, audio or image - while optimizing the size-quality ratio. It is powered by the Rambla Transcoding Service (= RATS), a distributed solution that allows the encoding load to be spread efficiently over multiple clustered nodes.

Access Methods

You can leverage the power of our encoding platform in different ways:

• Web Interface : our Control Panel contains a wizard-like interface to encode individual files quickly and easily.
• Web Application : get more freedom by using our RATS web application directly. This way, you can create custom target formats, import and export profiles, launch (batch) jobs.
• Integration : the RATS API allows you to integrate our encoding service into your custom workflow or content management solution. To get started quickly, use the RATS client libraries or the Drupal module, available as open source software.
• Hotfolder : simply upload your source files via FTP and get notified when they are encoded and published to the location you desire. Provides an easy way to automate publishing your videos for HTML5 or adaptive streaming.

Encoding Features

These are some of the encoding features made available by RATS:

• Create custom encoding formats : customize your encoding format by controlling parameters like container type, video/audio codec, size, aspect ratio, bit rates, frame rate, sample rate, audio channels, hinting, mobile-specific options, choice of deinterlacing...
• Resizing and cropping : video's can be resized and/or cropped, depending on the transcoding format
• Cutting : transcode only part of your video, or cut it up into different parts
• Generate thumbnails : thumbnails can be grabbed at any point in the video and converted to any size or quality
• Watermarking : add a logo or overlay image to your encoded video

Other Features

Our encoding platform has the ability to import your source files from an external location (e.g. FTP server). You can download your encoded files directly from RATS storage or you can have them exported to a pre-defined location. RATS is also fully integrated into the Rambla CDN, allowing you to automatically publish your transcoded files to a chosen directory on the CDN. You can use our Control Panel to retrieve details about your encoding jobs at any time, including the number of credits charged for each job.

For each transcoding job, RATS also generates an extensive report which contains the transcoding parameters, details about the encoded file, the location at which the file was published, and more. You can instruct RATS to send these reports to your email address(es) or to send a HTTP POST request (containing the report in the request body) to a given URL.

Since RATS supports Plug-ins, you can ask Rambla to develop custom processing or notification actions, which may be inserted at any stage of the encoding process.