Ever since September 10, I've been quite excited about the announcment that Adobe was finally releasing an encoding server solution called Flash Media Encoding Server.  I was able to secure a pre-release version through work to take it for a test drive.

Initial results were great.  Of course, being a pre-release, there were several challenges.  The first being that the software required a USB drive for a USB key.  In a time when virtualization is sweeping the corporate world in an effort to reduce costs, the requirement for something as simple as a physical USB port was very irritating.  We overcame that with a hardware/software solution, not the most desirable (spending money just for trial software), but oh well. 

The next challenage was the documentation, or rather, the lack thereof.  Yes, the basic steps for installing the software were included, as well as the basic steps for setting up watch folders.  One of the big features I was anxious to test, though, was the SDK.  Surprise, surprise.  No SDK documentation.  We're hoping to put FMES (or some transcoding agent) in the front of our video asset management workflow to generate proxies of video assets for review within out applications.  Most of our applications are homegrown and based on Adobe technologies (ColdFusion, Flash/Flex, AIR, etc).  So the ability to leverage a transcoding solution via SDK is a vital element.

Aside from the lack of documenation with the pre-release trial, I did find that several of the source files I tried to run through FMES couldn't be encoded.  Ok so they were odd codecs (WMV3, muxed mpeg, etc), but still.  The error messages gave me little to go on besides the error message, "There is a video decoding error."  Using some other transcoding tools, I was able to encode the problem files, however, so why couldn't FMES process them?

Finally, my biggest surprise is that in testing FMES, I discovered that at its core, it's really a product by Rhozet called Carbon Coder.  After a little quick digging, I discovered this press release indicating Adobe's intentions.  It seems to me that, basically, Adobe has taken Rhozet's product, swapped out the words "Rhozet Carbon Coder" with "Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server" and limited the outputs to only those that are compatible with Flash.  The licensing model is slightly different than Rhozet's, however, it is more or less the same product.

At this point, I'm trying to decide why we would want to go with FMES over Carbon Coder.  If we're going to spend several thousand dollars to a transcoding solution, why not spend a few more and not be limited to only Flash-enabled media outputs?

Now that FMES is available for purchase, Adobe will have more documentation or white papers available that can make a good argument, in addition to not choking on certain input formats.  Granted, video transcoding experts can probably explain why some of these problems exist and how to solve or get around them, but for a product that seems as if it should be a turnkey solution from Adobe, I would have hoped my intermediate skills in working with video transcoding should be more than enough to work with FMES. 

More to follow in the coming weeks, I'm sure...