FAQ

Flix Cloud isn't a consumer video publishing site. It's intended use is a back-end service to programatically transcode very large amounts of video for the folks who operate such things as consumer video sites. All video jobs are created using our RESTful XML API

In other words, using Flix Cloud requires some programming (not much, but some).

1. Sign up for Flix Cloud.
2. Create transcoding Recipes (collections of transcoding settings) in your Flix Cloud Dashboard. Recipes are easy to create with our Recipe Wizard, and you can make as many of them as you want.
3. Connect your application with Flix Cloud using our RESTful application programming interface (API) and set your REST receiver URL in your Dashboard.
4. Submit transcoding jobs. You can view and monitor your jobs, fees, account information and other setting in your Dashboard.

Flix Cloud is a video transcoding service. "Service" here means a service for web applications, not people. Flix Cloud will not bring you breakfast or play you at tennis.

Flix Cloud takes video transcoding requests ("jobs") from other web applications using a software architecture called REST. Basically, this is what happens:

• You upload videos to your server or Amazon S3 bucket.
• Your application generates a transcoding request for each video and sends it to https://www.flixcloud.com/jobs in an HTTP POST.
• Flix Cloud creates a new job for each video and assigns it to a Flix Engine transcoding "worker" machine in Amazon EC2. Flix Cloud dynamically calls up as many worker machines as it needs to accommodate load.
• The worker copies your video from storage and transcodes it according to the transcoding "recipe" in your request. Recipes are preconfigured collections of transcoding settings. You set them up in your Flix Cloud Dashboard.
• The newly transcoded file is written to a storage location, also specified in your request.
• Flix Cloud sends an HTTP POST notification to your application with details about the job.

Anybody who has a lot of video to transcode but doesn't want to spend a lot of money on servers, electricity, administration, etc. More specifically, Flix Cloud is designed for web application developers.

Please see the Features section.

Note: Flix Cloud only supports encoding and decoding audio streams within video container files. We don't support standalone audio containers such as .MP3 .M4A and .WMA.

At this time, Flix Cloud only supports creating audio with video streams in video file containers.

It depends.

Flix Cloud has maximum appeal for users who value scalability, cost flexibility and the fact that there's no transcoder machines to provision, fund and maintain.

Flix Engine licensees, on the other hand, tend to have already invested in transcoder machines, so Flix Cloud is a different fit for them and its appeal may be less obvious.

One suggestion for Flix Engine licensees is to evaluate Flix Cloud for overflow or backup processing that exceeds their in-house capacity, and then decide how and if Flix Cloud fits their operations.

Since you will likely send a lot more data in than you send out, we feel that input data should cost less. See our pricing comparison page for an explanation.

It's the "in + out" wording that throws people. Under those pricing schemes, you pay $0.25 per 100 MB for all data going in and another $0.25 for all data going out.

Our prices in each direction are lower than $0.25 — but we save you even more because our input rate is really low. In most transcoding jobs, input video volume is much bulkier than output. Also, we don't round jobs up to the nearest cent as some people do. We track the cost of jobs down to the 1000th of a cent. See our handy pricing calculator and our pricing comparison page for more info.

You can read the Flix Cloud Terms of Service and Service Level Agreement (SLA) here or during sign up.

When using S3, you must grant Flix Cloud access to your bucket. If you are only reading input files from S3, Flix Cloud needs READ access. If you are reading from and writing files to S3, Flix Cloud needs READ/WRITE access. The email address to use in your S3 bucket ACL is s3@flixcloud.com. For instructions, see the Amazon S3 ACL documentation.

When you sign up for Flix Cloud we run a $1 authorization request against your credit card. It is not a sale, but some banks display it as one. We do the $1 authorization to make sure the card number is valid, the card is not expired or stolen, etc. Authorizations are standard practice in e-commerce. An authorization hold usually expires in three business days but if you want to remove it yourself you can call your card issuer.

We charge your credit card monthly, unless you reach your monthly reserve, which could happen several times per month if you transcode a lot of video. We will email you when you approach your reserve so you can contact us to have it increased. All new Flix Cloud accounts have a default reserve of $1,000.

If you need a higher reserve, please contact us.

No. You are only charged once for the input file. Your input files are cached in Flix Cloud for 30 minutes. However, if you submit a job using that file after it is removed from the cache, you will be charged again. Sorry.

Also, be aware that if you cancel a job, you will be charged for the amount of output data that was processed prior to canceling. For example, if you submit a job and it encodes for five minutes before you cancel it, we add the size of the incomplete output file to your total output data.

Yes. We never store your credit card information on our servers. We use a "tokenized" vault scheme provided by our credit card gateway, Braintree Payment Solutions.