Encoding.com recently released a new utility (in beta) called Vid.ly. What does it do? In a nutshell, you upload a video and it encodes that video for you. Then it gives you a single URL to that video. But here’s the secret sauce. When that URL is used, no matter what device a person happens to be using (web browser, cell phone, iPad, etc.) they’ll be able to watch your video. In other words, that single URL makes the video playable across all devices.
Vid.ly addresses an annoying problem with web video, that problem being no standards. If you want your video viewable by people using different web browsers, people using iPad’s and iPhones, other mobile phones and other mobile devices, you have to encode your video into multiple formats…and then…code a video player to auto-detect what device a viewer is using to deliver your video in the proper format.
Vid.ly does all this for you behind the scenes. When you upload a video, it transcodes your video to multiple formats. Then through the magic of the Vid.y URL supplied for your video, it serves up the correct video for the correct device. For the video player, the open-source VideoJS and OSMF players are used.
So how well does the utility work? Well, remember it is in beta and you need an invitation to use it. I had an invitation, tried it out and here’s what happened:
1. I uploaded an MP4 video with the dimensions of 1280×720. After a few minutes, a message was returned that the conversion failed. I figured it was due to the video dimensions being too large, so…
2. I uploaded the same MP4 with the dimensions of 640×360. This time the conversion worked but the URL it gave me was basically dead (i.e. it didn’t work). No big deal, the utility is in beta, so…
3. I uploaded the same video again and this time everything worked fine. The conversion was reasonably fast and the proper video format was served up for the proper browser/device.
Firefox showed the Ogg version, Chrome the WebM version, IE the Flash version and iPhone’s/iPad’s the MP4 version. The only fail was on an Android phone which said of the video “this type of Flash is not supported”. But then again, I’ve never gotten any video to play on the particular Android phone I was using.
Across the board, the video quality was very good and playback was smooth (Amazon S3 is used to stream the videos). Below is the actual Vid.ly link link to the video, as well as an embedded version (Vid.ly gives you embed code too…please note the embedded version is not showing up in this blog post, in IE8, for some reason):
Actual Vid.ly URL: http://vid.ly/9h0y4q
[simple_video]
Vid.ly is currently free…meaning there is no cost to you to upload videos and have them converted and streamed. A “Pro” version will be available for soon, which will likely add additional features web video producers need, at a cost.
The bottom line? With Vid.ly, they promise a “single URL for all video”. And that’s exactly what they deliver. Sure, you can accomplish the same thing yourself with a little extra work. But they make it easy. As a result, Vid.ly will likely find a lot of success.
You can check it out for yourself and request an invitation here: http://vid.ly