Using a pre-built video transcoding solution

A lot of cloud providers, particularly CDN providers, offer some form of video streaming service, that takes care of transcoding and serving videos for you. These can seem like easy, convenient solutions - which to be fair, they are - but they have specific advantages and disadvantages, and you should consider carefully if they suit your use case.

Advantages

Ease of deployment

Since you don't have to do any development, getting your site to support user uploaded videos (or other video content) is a lot faster and easier using a pre-built solution. 

Low likelihood of bugs

When making your own transcoding solution, there's always the risk of having weird bugs here and there. The pre-built solutions are generally designed by large teams, and have many different customers, so they're going to have been rigorously tested and will be unlikely to give you much trouble in terms of bugs or errors.

Depending on provider, can be cheaper than a dedicated transcoding service

Some providers have fairly cheap offerings, and/or do not charge you for video transcoding and instead only charge for storage and CDN bandwidth, which can turn out to be a better price option than using dedicated transcoding. You'll have to examine the offerings available to figure out which one is best for you.

Disadvantages

Lack of configuration choices and control, lower quality

Depending on your use case, a pre-built video transcoding solution might not have the options you need it to have (for instance, it might only support a certain set of resolutions and not any others).

In addition, many prebuilt solutions don't give you much, if any, control over how videos are transcoded. This can be problematic if you need videos to be to a particular quality standard, or you want them to be small in filesize but not low in quality, neither of which prebuilt solutions are generally aimed at.

Can be more costly in the long run in some cases

InAs theory,most prebuilt solutions seemdon't cheap;let you customise the encoding or other options too much, you'll often end up with videos that are larger in filesize than they don'could be, resulting in higher bandwidth costs.

In many cases, this isn't need youlikely to developbe youra ownbig solution,enough so you don't havedifference to paymake aexpensive developer.transcoding Onworthwhile, topbut if you're only teanscoding small numbers of that,videos theyand oftenexpecting providevery transcodinglarge asview part of the price, compared to doingcounts, it yourselfcan wherebe worth using a dedicated transcoding servicesservice costto moneyobtain smaller videos for eachthe videosame youquality transcode.

and

Thethus downside of this is that if you have a use case where videos are going to be uploaded once, but viewed a very large number of times,reduce the primarybandwidth cost you will incur may not be from transcoding the video but from serving it to large numbers of users, and so being able to have more control over exactly how the video is encoded is very important there. 

The result is that you'll end up paying more in CDN costs than you would have paid in transcoding fees, and for lower quality video as well.costs.