Flix Cloud

Differences between Zencoder and Flix Cloud

Zencoder offers numerous improvements over Flix Cloud, including new settings, optimizations, and codecs. But there are a few important differences, and a few things that we don’t support. Here is a rundown.

Zencoder improvements

Our New Features page shows a list of improvements and features offered by Zencoder that weren’t in Flix Cloud.

Recipes vs. API requests

Zencoder does not have a stored recipe system. Output settings are controlled directly by the API request. This makes the Zencoder API flexible and easy to use, but it is different from Flix Cloud, where you used a web interface to lock down a group of output settings called a “Recipe.”

However, we can port your Flix Cloud recipes over to Zencoder. This means that you’ll be able to use the exact same API requests with Zencoder that you used with Flix Cloud. You’ll just need to change to the Zencoder API structure if you need to change your output settings.

If you want to switch to the new Zencoder API syntax, the Zencoder dashboard offers a handy API builder to help you construct your API requests, much like the recipe configurator in Flix Cloud. Just copy and paste the request from the Recipe Builder into your app and you’re ready to go.

Multiple outputs

Zencoder supports multiple outputs from one job request. So you can ask for three different video sizes from one input video.

Options

Flix Cloud includes a few options that aren’t implemented in Zencoder: Brightness, Contrast, Hue, Saturation, Blur, and Mirror. Instead, Zencoder have some (more useful) video processing filters, like Autolevels, Deblock, and Denoise.

Zencoder also enables some Flix Engine options that aren’t in Flix Cloud, so you can take full control over your VP6 recipes.

Codecs

Zencoder supports H.264 and VP6, just like Flix Cloud. Zencoder also supports WebM/VP8 and Ogg Theora/Vorbis, and MPEG-4 and 3GP video are coming soon.

We don’t currently support WMV or H.263 as output formats, but we may down the road. If you want or need access to these codecs, talk to us and we’ll see what we can do.