Server based H.264 encoding for flash server

[thymceelie]

I've been researching for a couple days now, but thought I'd throw this out to you guys. I work for a university and we're in process of adding the new FMS 3 and are looking into different server based encoding options to add youtube type functionality to our CMS. We're leaning towards using h.264 as opposed to On2's VP6. The On2 Flix Engine supports AVC encoding, but I'm curious if there are better/cheaper options out there. Most of the content will probably be long form (20minutes to an hour) and it needs to stream and not progressive download. Our developers like On2 because of its Java API, but it seems like its mostly based off of FFMPEG. Any thoughts?

[Dark Shikari]

I've been researching for a couple days now, but thought I'd throw this out to you guys. I work for a university and we're in process of adding the new FMS 3 and are looking into different server based encoding options to add youtube type functionality to our CMS. We're leaning towards using h.264 as opposed to On2's VP6. The On2 Flix Engine supports AVC encoding, but I'm curious if there are better/cheaper options out there. Most of the content will probably be long form (20minutes to an hour) and it needs to stream and not progressive download. Our developers like On2 because of its Java API, but it seems like its mostly based off of FFMPEG. Any thoughts?Libx264 (through ffmpeg) can do what you're looking for.

[thymceelie]

any licensing issues? We have lots of distance courses. So we're charging money, but not for the video per se, for the course. I read the 4 page summary, but a second, third opinion is always good.
-T

[Dark Shikari]

any licensing issues? We have lots of distance courses. So we're charging money, but not for the video per se, for the course. I read the 4 page summary, but a second, third opinion is always good.-Tx264 is free, but you still have to deal with licensing fees from the MPEG-4 LA.

[thymceelie]

Is there anywhere I can go where the licensing terms are broken down into layman's terms? Thanks for the help Shikari.

[Dark Shikari]

Is there anywhere I can go where the licensing terms are broken down into layman's terms? Thanks for the help Shikari.Licensing Terms (http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf), from MPEG-LA.