This is the first mention of the Flix Engine SDK price ( serverside encoding of videofiles to VP6 FLV files with PHP, Java, Python and Perl for Linux and a whole set of other languages on Windows through COM interop ) that i see publicly available online. You want to work on the next Youtube? It'll cost you EURO 3750 for the software...follow the links, especially Flashhosting (dutch) for more information.
Link: FlashHosting (dutch).
Link: On2 Flix Engine SDK for Flash 8 - On2 Technologies.
The last time I talked to their sales rep for a license that we tried to buy, here is what I gathered.
There are actually two license. You can either do a flat annual fee of $3000 per system with a volume discount built in at 5 units or above, or you can go to a pay-as-you-go per-encode model. The pay-as-you-go model looks like this:
$1750 per system license fee (includes 1000 encodes)
Additional encode packs:
- 1000 for $125
- 5000 for $469
- 25000 for $1563
- 50000 for $2500
- 250000 for $7813
- 1M for $25,000
- 10M for $187,500
Both licensing models include all software updates as well as email and phone-based technical support. Continuing support for the pay-as-you-go model is $500 per year per system.
Ok, so let's look at that. Even for one of our Alpha Product Launch we have over 10 64Bit CPU machines (I never got an update from them if they are now supporting 64Bit, they were working on it) to do the encoding. You can now calculate the cost involved. If you are talking about something like YouTube, it will run into Millions. At this situation, it will be better to hire a programmer and enhance, debug FFMPEG and write transcodes for those not there. Well, that is actually what we did, spend the money and time to do it ourselves. Flix is good for prototypers, developers/freelancers who want to test, demo to their clients and not for serious big time jobs.
I hope you have done your homework when you wrote that article that it can be used by another YouTube Clone. I would not say "not even near to it". Flix would definitely be good for you and for me who wants to demo coupla apps to clients and not on million dollar products. This is not to say that Flix is bad, it is an extremely cool product and you have a company behind it that does your hard work and people whom you can call up and get help. My personal interaction with them was also extremely helpful, they were on call at any time. I would have used them for small to medium project but it depends where you use it - definitely not with a YouTube-Alike.
It took me and few of our team about 2 weeks to come to this decision. I am not even sure if we went ahead with a Flix License (I think we did) which we used for emergency coding and see how it fares but will never be used for production.
Note: I'm sorry but I am not able to tell you our product as of today but should be up in a day or two.
Posted by: Brajeshwar | Thursday, November 23, 2006 at 08:13
And now you gotta tell me how to " hire a programmer and enhance, debug FFMPEG and write transcodes for those not there." without breaking licenses, patents and laws, as long as you want to use high quality On2 Flash 8 codec.
We have had the same thoughts and need to upgrade to Flash8, but double checked with our legal department and there is absolutely no legal way to do so, like you described. And big companies like to have their business plans secured by those terms, by the way.
Posted by: TW | Thursday, November 23, 2006 at 08:38
Quote:
I hope you have done your homework when you wrote that article that it can be used by another YouTube Clone. I would not say "not even near to it".
So we actually agree ;) (or did you mean 'I would say')
On a serious note, I don't really quite understand what you're suggesting with the 'do my homework' part, but my calculator says that a flat annual fee is a much better deal for high-volume encoding situations then a pay-per-encoding solution. Not to mention that bandwidth and storage is way more expensive then encoding i'd say. Then as TW mentioned, there is no alternative in FFMPEG, that just simply won't hold in court when ON2 is gonna sue you for patent infringement.
If you're having a cluster of encoding machines available, i'd be more interested spending my time and resources working with On2 to see if they have a solution, doing distributed, parallel video transcoding. :)
Posted by: ohwhen | Thursday, November 23, 2006 at 13:33
Do you know if this is really what You Tube uses? Or have they put something together themsevles. From what I read, on2 is basically the only full featured product out there. The other contender from Turbine does not support flash 8.
Posted by: Michael | Monday, November 27, 2006 at 22:20
Yes, that's correct as I understand it - for Flash 8 SDK's, whether for a website, integrated system, standalone product, or live streaming, On2 is the only game in town.
Posted by: VideoKing | Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 20:52
From the last time I checked, YouTube does NOT use VP6 (Flash 8) - it uses H.263 (Flash 7). So, if you want to build a YouTube like site you could use ffmpeg or Turbine Video Engine
Posted by: MFernandes | Monday, January 01, 2007 at 15:01
We use Flix Engine and I must say that when it works its good but it seems very flakey. Our encoding server needs rebooting at least once a day due to jobs getting stuck and the engine crashing. It really hates some types of video.
I'd much prefer to use ffmpeg but I don't suppose on2 will licence the VP6 codec to the open source community ever!
Posted by: James White | Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 13:20
Q1)why don't, use the chroma key in the flix eng SDK ?
i need to useing in SDK!
get it? my Q1 ?
reply to me your clear A1.
Posted by: kim gongo00 | Saturday, August 04, 2007 at 19:15