As mentioned in other articles on Digital Media Directory - encoding.com is a great service and excellent value. 

Having spoken with their executive team, I can tell you that they have a great service, it's easy to use and is flexible.  On top of all that, the pricing is very reasonable and they will give you a free trial of the service! For the bigger jobs, they will even offer professional services to do the work for you!  They don't just use a server running an encoding software.  They have tons of servers running all kinds of encoding applications, depending on the type of format you are encoding, the job will go to the most appropriate type of queue. 

Check out their site, I highly recommend it!  www.encoding.com

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Video Encoding as a Web Service

Encoding is the process of changing digital content from one format to another. This process is an integral component of the explosion in Internet and mobile video. Where the large majority of all encoding/transcoding providers address the market with expensive an inflexible software or hardware solutions we believe the challenge of encoding is better delivered as a software as a service model with elastic capacity and usage based billing

Cost/Scalability

The video encoding process is an extremely computing intensive task requiring high capacity servers to complete even the most basic video encoding projects in a reasonable time frame. As a point of reference a 60 minute high quality Quicktime movie will take over 3 hours and the majority of the resources of a general purpose server to encode for the Internet. If this same movie will be converted to support popular mobile devices it would need to be encoded at least another 3-4 times, bringing the total to ~10 hours of computing for 1 hour of content. Current hardware/software solutions require operators to build out an elaborate and expensive sever infrastructure to support large encoding projects or maintain capacity to support a spike in demand. Encoding.com offers a unique “pay as you use” pricing model that charges customers for usage in the form of “encoding bandwidth” Encoding bandwidth is the sum of all of the source media(GB) sent to the system and all of the finished/encoded media (GB) sent out of the system. (media in + media out = encoding bandwidth) This price model benefits customers by requiring no fixed system overhead while at the same time ensures access to elastic computing demand to support large encoding projects or a spike in demand. By removing the hardware, bandwidth, software, administration costs of maintaining a dedicated encoding infrastructure we can save customers up to 80% of their annual encoding costs

Cloud Computing Architecture

One of the core architecture principles that enables the encoding.com feature set, scalability and price point is the incorporation of the cloud computing principles in the design process. Customers of the encoding.com cloud are abstracted from finite resource limits of the underlying servers and software usually associated with video encoding and are presented with completely elastic encoding resources, that is the larger the encoding project that is sent to the encoding.com system the more computing resources are allocated to the project. This principle is especially critical in the world of video encoding as client demand for encoding services is not only highly sporadic, but also computing resource intensive.

Flexible Integration

Our encoding service is accessible to organizations and developers via an XML API. This widely accepted and extensible integration method allows our encoding service to be quickly and easily integrated into any proprietary software platform, examples include internal content management systems, content delivery network platforms, internal media or video editing workflows, or user generated video websites.

Mobile Device Support

With the proliferation of mobile devices that support video comes new challenges as customers begin to request video content on various mobile phones and mobile devices: iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple TV, Microsoft Zune, Sony Play Station Portable (PSP). Unfortunately each of these popular devices has different video format/codec requirements, screen size, resolution etc. As a content owner who intends on publishing to mobile devices one must not only research how to encode for various mobile devices but keep up to date with the fast pace of change as new mobile phones and devices updates are released regularly. Encoding.com maintains an proprietary device data base which contains the media specifications of over 200 devices and offers a set of encoding presets which convert video to popular devices in one easy step.

Source Video Formats

Below is the list of video formats encoding.com can decode from.
Note: If a format presents it the list it doesn't mean we support all codecs for this format.

If you have any questions about this topic, please feel free to post them here and I will respond.  As always I ask that you support our sponsors.

Thanks,

 Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)

"Trusted" formats

"Untrusted" formats

The following input formats are not tested. Use them at own risk.