Director's commentary — engineering insights, product updates, and video transcoding deep dives.
Transcodely runs a hosted MCP server at mcp.transcodely.com/mcp. Point Claude at it, authorize in the browser, and it can submit transcoding jobs, ingest and host videos, generate captions, and read back status, playback links, and spend — seven tools, no key to paste, no gateway to run.
Our conformance suite runs real transcoding jobs on real worker VMs, probes the produced media with ffprobe, parses the manifests, and recomputes the invoice — for every capability in the API. All 164 cases and both known gaps are public.
Our first captions implementation spun up a second server for every captioned upload. Here's why that was wrong, how we folded transcription into the encode job itself, and the billing guards we added so an empty caption file can never charge you money.
A walkthrough for wiring Transcodely's MCP server into Claude Code: one registration command, a browser authorize, and four workflows the shipped tools actually support — host, transcode, caption, audit spend — plus the limits worth knowing before you hand an agent a billable API.
Every video can now ship with accurate, automatically generated captions — one flag on hosted uploads, one line on API jobs, €0.05 per source minute. Transcribed on our own workers, delivered inside your HLS/DASH manifest, and never billed for silence.
Cloudflare R2 is now a first-class storage origin in Transcodely. Point a transcoding job at an R2 bucket with just your account ID — then deliver the output to viewers with zero egress fees.
Upload a video, get back an HLS stream, an embeddable player, and a CDN URL. Transcodely now ships an end-to-end hosting layer on top of our transcoding API — priced per GB, not per seat.
A practical comparison of the four major video codecs — compression efficiency, encoding speed, device support, licensing costs, and when to use each.
After a decade of fighting overpriced transcoding services, misleading pricing, and manual VMAF calculations, I built the encoding API I always wanted.
An honest comparison of video encoding costs across AWS MediaConvert, Mux, Coconut, Bitmovin, Google Cloud, and Transcodely — with real numbers.
VMAF is the perceptual quality metric Netflix uses to measure video quality. Here's how it works, what scores mean, and why your encoding pipeline needs it.
Per-title encoding analyzes each video's complexity to generate optimal bitrate ladders — saving 20-50% on bandwidth without sacrificing quality.
A step-by-step guide to building an HLS adaptive streaming pipeline — from encoding multi-bitrate variants to CDN delivery.
AV1 now powers 30% of Netflix and 75% of YouTube. Here's the current state of adoption, hardware support, and what it means for your video pipeline.
Encoding is only 10-20% of total video cost. Here are 6 practical strategies to cut your overall video bill by up to 60%.
CMAF lets you encode video once and serve both HLS and DASH from the same segments — cutting storage costs and encoding time in half.
