After three days of looking at multiple enterprise encoding systems, I decided that I couldn’t meaningfully tell them apart by a features and benefits approach. I had to look at the high level product philosophy. Fortunately, I was meeting with two companies that couldn’t have been further apart. Briefly, Anystream wants to be a soup to nuts provider, while Rhozet wants to provide the best darn encoding tool available, and that’s it.

Note that neither approach is right or wrong, just more or less well suited for what you’re looking for in an enterprise encoding system. Between the two companies, you’ll see the extremes of this type of product offering.

In this post, I’ll discuss Rhozet, where I met with company president David Trescott and product marketing manager Jon Robbins. Check out Anystream’s pitch

What questions should a company ask before buying an enterprise encoding systems?

First is does the product input all relevant formats that you’re working with, and output all formats that you need to deliver, streaming and otherwise.

Second is video quality. We believe that we deliver the best overall video quality, but our prospects don’t need to take our word for it since we provide evaluation software that lets them try before they buy. They can also check encoding speed, where we also excel.

Next is scalability and then price. How many computers will it take to deliver volume that they need and what’s it cost.

What’s your product philosophy?

We’re trying to be the best possible transcoder available, with an extensive, free API for integrating with other programs. This philosophy lets our customers choose the best of breed tools for content management, website management, workflow and broadcast automation and we fit into that workflow. One objective metric that we’re succeeding is that many of the asset management systems that offer an encoding tool use our product.

How can clients integrate Carbon Coder’s encoding functions with other programs?

We provide an XML-based SDK which allows for complete customization of all our products. Every aspect of the encoding process can be controlled by the SDK, including source files, target files, pre-compression filtering, asset compositing, advertising insertion, XML titling, file retrieval and delivery and, of course, encoding parameters.

You just shipped Carbon Coder 3. What are the top new features?

The entire administration tool for managing jobs is new, with a new queue manager, greatly expanded watch folder functionality, and more efficient views of the server farm operation. We’ve also added support for H.264 Flash files using the F4V format, expanded VC-1 export with full access to registry tweaks formerly available in the WMV Power Toy. We now have 16-channel audio support and integrated quality checking, where we can flag files with dropped frames and dropped audio.

Overall, it’s a very substantial upgrade.