Panda is an open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming, running completely within Amazon’s Web Services using customized EC2 instances, S3 and SimpleDB. It has support for the encoding profiles which FFmpeg supports. They include FLV for flash and H264 for iPhone.

The service is easy to integrate with your application. The EC2 instance will provide a simple REST (both YAML and XML formats support) API for listing, creating, editing and deleting videos. When a new video is created on your site the actual file upload takes place in a popup or iframe. Doing so means that the large video file is uploaded directly to your Panda EC2 instance so you don’t have to handle it within your application. The server also is configured to support an upload progress bar so user’s can see the video upload in progress. It cannot get any easier than this.

The range of encoding support does not depend on Panda, but rather depends on ffmpeg and Libavcodec(open source encoder/decoder tools and libraries Panda use underneath) encoding capability. Wikipedia page has a list of implemented video codecs. For Panda AMI setup, see this and this google group thread. Continue reading…

In the struggle to keep up with the new technologies, Microsoft realized that REST becomes more and more popular, so they’re trying to add REST support in all web technologies they offer. If you missed the news at PDC (not hard to, we’ve got our years full of new buzz words), Microsoft added REST support to WCF. The REST Starter Kit is a preview of features that are being considered for WCF 4.0, released early on CodePlex so you can download it, look at the code, play with it, and give feedback to Microsoft so they will deliver the right REST features in WCF 4.0. You can find everything you need to learn about RESTful WCF at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/wcf/rest. It has links to download the Starter Kit from CodePlex, a white paper and series of screencasts on using the Starter Kit, overview documentation, release notes, and even hands on labs.