Overview: Zencoder

Zencoder is a powerful platform for transcoding on-demand video.

Introduction

Zencoder offers a fast and reliable transcoding service for video and audio files. It can produce outputs for the web and a wide variety of devices, and can easily be integrated with your CMS and other applications.

The UI

Zencoder is primarily an API, but there is a UI that includes:

Account settings
A dashboard showing results of recent jobs
An API Request Builder that allows you to get started with the API without writing code

The API

There are several functions you can perform using the API, the most important of which are submitting and managing encoding jobs for video-on-demand.

For a full guide to the API endpoints, see the API Reference.

The power of Zencoder lies in the flexibility it offers you to create exactly the kind of outputs you want. This is also the source of some complexity, as there are many encoding settings to understand. A good place to start exploring these is the summary of Encoding Settings, which has links to take you into the full descriptions with sample code.