New Bamboo's Platform Sounds Cute and Promising

New Bamboo, a software company that’s been developing solutions using the infamous Ruby on Rails since its conception, released Panda -- a new Open Source platform designed for the easy uploading, transcoding and streaming of videos on websites.

Panda-Monium

Demands for better video management on the web are steadily increasing. Unfortunately, it happens to be one of those things that web developers tend to wince at the thought of.

Damien Tanner, co-founder of New Bamboo says: “Video is always a thorny issue for developers. It requires a large amount of space on the server and bandwidth for streaming. The other issue is that uploaded videos must be transcoded into various formats for playback on the web." And this process can be very resource-intensive.

Panda’s goal is to eliminate all of those sticky issues, and they do so by using the following features complete with a sweet REST API:

• Everything contained within one elegant Merb application. Merb is framework written with Ruby, which means it focuses on core functionality. It is reportedly the fastest and most flexible option for instances of high traffic.
• Support for the numerous encoding profiles FFmpeg supports including FLV, h264 for Flash and the iPhone formats
• Panda gem for painless integration with Ruby on Rails and Merb
• Lovely little admin dashboard for managing your videos

Panda In The Sky With Diamonds

Panda is built to run within Amazon’s cloud computing environment (EC2) which has everything pre-installed for your convenience and includes a multitude of Amazon products and codecs. Upload quickly, encode even quicker with SimpleDB and finally, store videos using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which offers unlimited space and easy access and retrieval from anywhere on the web.

Hope For Panda In The Future

With a background as promising as the one New Bamboo has provided, it’s hard to see this particular panda getting stuck on the endangered list anytime soon. Okay, but seriously, all panda jokes aside, it sounds like they've got a good thing going, right? But one can never be too sure, so if you'd like to give it a try, download it free over at www.pandastream.com and tell us what you think!

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