I'm all for an open source Git front-end, but the design of Gitlab is just too close to GitHub. Even things like "Network" have been replicated exactly. Anyone else see this as a problem?
Here's the source code that anyone can use to independently test and corroborate the results: https://github.com/zencoder/cloudharmony-benchmark. We chose Cloud Harmony to run the benchmark on the basis of their independent reputation. However, we'd happily sponsor (pay for encoding fees) another third-party to run the tests as well. Feel free to suggest an additional, neutral person/company that could do this. Though the results will be the same, no matter who runs it. :)
This is mostly about the business side of things. Many of our customers are encoding to multiple formats to deliver a better user experience and we wanted our pricing to adapt.
Technically, we encode all of the outputs for a file in parallel across multiple transcoding servers. We're looking for ways to reduce the number of steps involved in moving an input file through the system which may result in some sort of forking of the decode to multiple simultaneous encodes, but that remains to be seen.
It's possible for sure, but definitely tough. My family came with me, but we were only together on the weekends. Without a doubt it was one of the hardest, most stretching, and most valuable experiences of my life.
At that time we had just released Flix Cloud. We have spent the last year supporting that product and learning from our customers. This release of Zencoder is the result.
As for the last question: when you're offered a spot in YC, you don't turn it down!
Another developer here. I think you may be referring to an actual Flash streaming server. We're currently using Amazon CloudFront that doesn't support it. We're taking a good look at Limelight and others that do support Flash streaming for the future. Thanks for your feedback.