Easily convert digital video for streaming, downloads, set top boxes, or portable media players by subscribing to Advection.NET’s high performance transcoding server farm.

If you have digital content already, created by digital video cameras, produced by software like Premiere, Final Cut, or even Windows Movie Maker, or copied from DVDs, you can upload that content to our network for automated transcoding into digital downloads or streaming media formats.

Or, if you operate a user generated content (“UGC”) site that allows visitors to upload their own video, we can accept that video and convert it into the digital downloads or streaming media format your site offers.

Unlimited Transcoding Plans

The pricing for transcoding is based on the configuration and capacity of the system you’ll be using to convert your media throughout the following month. We don’t charge a “per file” processing fee. You can choose the maximum file sizes you want to support, the number of formats you want to convert to, and the number of files you want to be able to process simultaneously.

At least one encoding profile and at least one encoding queue are included in each plan; see our transcoding pricing table for details. Additional target encoding profiles or additional encoding queues can be added to any plan. To set up your transcoding, arrange for more profiles or additional queues, request special provisioning, or arrange for drive shipping, please contact our support team.

A transcoding subscription supports transcoding for one file at a time. If you upload multiple files, they are put into a queue, and are processed one at a time. Many formats take more time to transcode than the playback time of the file, so if you upload ten files that take an hour each to transcode, the process will take 10 hours. If you need to encode faster than that, you can subscribe to additional transcoding queues, to encode multiple files at once.

Pay-as-You-Go Cloud Encoding

While our Unlimited Transcoding Plans are fantastic for our clients with a steady supply of new movies or user generated content to encode, some customers may only need encoding in batches or bursts. After a one-time Cloud Setup fee ($95 flat fee if you use our preconfigured profiles, or $195 plus $165 per type of media you want to produce plus $45 per bit-rate), you can upload as much or as little video as you like and you’ll pay just $0.05 per minute of output video.

Our cloud encoding leverages Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud to distribute the job among as many servers as are needed to complete the job most rapidly. For example, you could encode a full season’s episodes of a TV show into H.264, Ogg Theora, and WebM, in both SD and HD bit-rates, in an hour.

Simplified Conversion

We accept files in many standard formats, including MPEG1/2, MPEG4, Windows Media, Flash, QuickTime, DV, and more. We transcode for Windows Media, Smooth Streaming, Flash, and Apple Adaptive streaming, to the latest versions of Silverlight, Flash, HTML5 and Apple device players, and also typically support output to the most recent prior versions.

The type of file we create is based on a “profile” that tells us the size, bitrate, and other parameters of the video you want produced. Many customers only use a single profile since all content on their site is the same size and bitrate. However, we’re happy to configure any number of profiles, so you can produce, for example, a streaming file at 300 kbps, a download file at 700 kbps, as well as a “set top box” file at 2 mbps. In this example, you’d have your included profile plus two additional profiles.

Mezzanine Files

When sending files, try to send files that are a few times higher bit-rate than the bit-rates you want us to produce, and are at least the dimensions of your maximum desired output dimensions. These files, called “mezzanine” files, do not need to be your original studio quality video, but should be higher quality than what you want us to produce.

• The frame size of your mezzanine should be at least the size of your largest deliverable. For example, if your end deliverable is 1280×720, your mezzanine should be no smaller than 1280×720.
• The bit rate of your mezzanine should be at least 2x, and preferably 5x to 10x, higher than the highest bit-rate end deliverable. The trade-off is upload time and storage if you plan to keep originals stored with us.
• Make sure the frame size contains the full picture without letterboxing or pillar boxing.
• Keep your content in its “native” frame rate if possible. For content originally shot in 24fps, keep it 24fps. If shot in 24fps, edited and telecined into 30fps, when creating your mezzanine inverse telecine back to 24fps if possible.
• Progressive is far preferable to interlaced, to avoid problems with mixed field dominance.

For a great source with great output, we’d prefer you send MPEG2 Transport Stream (MPEG2 TS) files—the type of file you would output to create a Bluray disc. The file extension is usually “.m2ts”. If you’re using Final Cut with Compressor 2, you can create an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, while with Compressor 3 or higher you can create either a MPEG-2 Transport Stream or a MPEG-2 Program Stream (the kind of file used on DVD). Either way, make sure under encoder menu, Extras tab, to select multiplexed mpeg-1/layer2 audio and select the transport stream or program stream radio button.

Source File Formats

We can encode from other formats too. Among the file types we accept:

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
• Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia, Bink
• Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV, Bink
• Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, DTS, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, Musepack,RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA, Bink
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer,VOBsub, VPlayer
• Image formats: BMP, JPEG, MNG, PCX, PTX, TGA, TIFF, SGI, Sun Raster

Breaking down the video formats and audio formats in further detail, we accept:

• ITU-T video standards: H.261, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, H.263 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
• ITU-T vocoder standards: G.711 µ-law, G.711 A-law, G.721 (aka G.726 32k), G.722, G.722.2 (aka AMR-WB), G.723 (aka G.726 24k and 40k) and G.726
• ISO/IEC MPEG video standards: MPEG-1 Part 2, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
• ISO/IEC MPEG audio standards: MP1, MP2, MP3, AAC, HE-AAC and MPEG-4 ALS
• ISO/IEC/ITU-T JPEG image standards: JPEG and JPEG-LS
• SMPTE video standards: VC-1 (aka WMV3), VC-3 (aka AVID DNxHD) and DPX image
• SMPTE audio standards: SMPTE 302M
• DVD Forum standards related / Dolby audio codecs: MLP (aka TrueHD) and AC-3
• 3GPP vocoder standards: AMR-NB, AMR-WB (aka G.722.2)
• GSM related voice codecs: Full Rate
• Windows Media Player related video codecs: Microsoft RLE, Microsoft Video 1, Cinepak, Indeo 2, 3 and 5, Motion JPEG, Microsoft MPEG-4 v1, v2 and v3, WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3 (aka VC-1)
• Windows Media Player related audio codecs: WMA1, WMA2 and WMA Pro
• Windows Media Player related voice codecs: WMA Voice and MS-GSM
• RealPlayer related video codecs: RealVideo 1, 2, 3 and 4
• RealPlayer related audio codecs: RealAudio 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10
• RealPlayer related voice codecs: RealAudio 1, 2 (variant of G.728), 4 and 5
• QuickTime related video codecs: Cinepak, Motion JPEG and Sorenson 3 Codec
• QuickTime related audio codecs: QDesign Music Codec 2 and ALAC
• Adobe Flash Player related video codecs: Sorenson 3 Codec, VP6 and Flash Video (FLV)
• Adobe Flash Player related audio codecs: Adobe SWF ADPCM and Nellymoser Asao
• Xiph.Org: Theora, Speex (via libspeex), Vorbis and FLAC
• Sony: ATRAC1 and ATRAC3
• NTT: TwinVQ
• On2: Duck TrueMotion 1, Duck TrueMotion 2, VP3, VP5, VP6 and VP8
• RAD Game Tools: Smacker video and Bink video
• Truespeech
• RenderWare: TXD

Our encoding specialists are available for consultation with customers at our standard support rates (depending on your plan), or to non-customers for $165 per hour.