Dear Flix Cloud customers,

As you may know, Google acquired On2 Technologies (creators of Flix Cloud) in February of 2010. Since then, we’ve reviewed the On2 products to determine which could fit into Google’s product family.

After careful consideration, we’ve decided to discontinue our Flix Cloud service. We will stop accepting new Flix Cloud customers on August 20, 2010.

We know how important it is for you to have enough time to make the transition from Flix Cloud to another solution, so we will continue to provide the Flix Cloud service until November 15, 2010 to allow for a smooth transition.

In addition, we’ve made arrangements with Zencoder, our Flix Cloud partner, to help Flix Cloud customers move to the Zencoder cloud encoding service if they so choose. During their recent stay at the YCombinator technology incubator the Zencoder team created a very impressive service that we believe offers many improvements over Flix Cloud, including two-pass H.264 output, faster queues, audio-only output, and support for the new open WebM video format. Michael Christopher from SchoolTube.com, a former Flix Cloud customer, recently switched to Zencoder and told us, “I ran some quality comparison tests, and I’m really excited to make this switch as the quality increase is flooring!”

Zencoder support representatives will contact you soon with transition information and guidelines. For more information about the transition, visit http://zencoder.com/flixcloud or click the “Switch to Zencoder” button in your Flix Cloud dashboard. If you choose to transition to Zencoder, you can login to your Flix Cloud dashboard and automatically transfer your recipes and account settings from Flix Cloud to Zencoder. Keep in mind that Zencoder is a third-party service that is independent from Flix Cloud, so you’ll be creating a new account at Zencoder, and agreeing to the Zencoder terms of use.

Building Flix Cloud was a fun and rewarding experience for our entire team. We sincerely thank all of you for using Flix Cloud. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me at jluther@google.com.

Best regards,
John Luther
Product Manager, Google

Brandon Arbini
Jon Dahl
Founders, Zencoder

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Flix Cloud is experiencing slow job processing & response times. We’re looking into it & will post reports as we learn more. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[UPDATE 11:52AM EST] We’re back up but slow. Accepting job requests, but with a limited number of workers. Hopefully be able to ramp up workers through the afternoon.

[UPDATE 11:43AM EST] We found multiple instanced of our queue scripts running on the DB server. These may have contributed to high CPU load.

[UPDATE 11:27AM EST] Our suspicion is that there is an outer_join query somewhere in the system keeps throttling the database. We had to block incoming jobs to try & locate the problem query.

This week we switched from ffmpeg to mediainfo for incoming video inspection. Mediainfo is a very nice tool, and failed inspections have all but disappeared since we deployed it in Flix Cloud.