Panda goes public today!

Over the past few months during our private beta we have had some incredibly useful feedback from you all. We’ve all been working hard to incorporate your feedback and polish the service to perfection.

The service has been successfully processing many thousands of videos a month and several of you have even launched publicly in this time!

Today we’re pleased to announce we are opening up the beta to the public.

If you haven’t yet tried it out, there’s no better time than now. We have several easy guides, client libraries and sample application for Rails, PHP and Django: http://pandastream.com/docs

That’s not all though!

HTML5 Video

There has been a lot of talk about HTML5 video over the past few months. Browsers have been embracing support for the video tag, and although there’s isn’t yet a consensus on the codec of choice, we are now at a stage where HTML5 video can be reliably delivered with a Flash fallback for older browsers. This year we are going to be seeing a lot more in this area and we have several great new things in the pipeline.

The great news today is that right now you can use Panda to encode video to serve up to your users via HTML5, Flash and iPhone/iPad devices. We’ve written a tutorial which is available here: http://pandastream.com/docs

Python library and Django example app

We’ve also released a Python library and Django example application: http://github.com/newbamboo/panda_client_python and http://github.com/newbamboo/panda_example_django

If you’ve written a client lib or example app yourself we’d love to hear about it.

Codecs

We’ve been paying close attention to the types of video that Panda has been processing and have identified several codecs and FFMpeg options which we will be adding in and deploying next week.

Private content

Amazon has recently released support for private content on CloudFront. Many of you have asked in the past how you can restrict content to certain users. We recently added a permission option to Encoding Clouds, which controls whether the files Panda saves to your S3 bucket are publicly readable or not. If you wish to use this new CloudFront feature, you should set your bucket to private, and then follow the instructions in the Amazon Documention to setup CloudFront correctly.

… and finally, thanks!

We’d like to thank all users part of the private beta for helping shape this superb product. We’ve got lots more to get on with now and will look forward to keeping you up to date with new features and updates.

Cheers, Damien and the whole Panda team.

PS: Don’t forget to checkout Pusherapp a new hosted realtime web service we launched into beta a few weeks ago.