Public and open HEVC encoding service in the cloud

The ability to record vast amounts of video content requires convenient and efficient video coding services with which users can tackle the limited storage and transmission capacities. This paper presents an open-source cloud service for encoding raw video formats and transcoding compressed videos to the latest HEVC/H.265 format. Respective commercial transcoding services are available on the Internet but they are behind a paywall. On the other hand, using command-line interfaces of existing open-source software solutions requires in-depth knowledge of the coding process to attain the best coding gain and speed. The proposed service is available online, it is free to use without any registration, and its easy-to-use web interface makes it feasible for non-technical users. It is built on the FFmpeg multimedia framework whose built-in decoders accept various input video formats that are then compressed to HEVC with a full-fledged Kvazaar open-source encoder.