We recently had to transcode a large number of videos for the iPhone. Rather than try to scale out our in-house infrastructure, we thought it would be prudent to check out different projects people had been working on. One stellar example is Panda (whom our friend Ezra Zygmuntowicz at Engine Yard mentioned to us). Panda leverages Amazon’s S3, EC2, and Simple DB web services to offer a very flexible, cost effective, and scalable option for integrating video transcoding into any site. We’re likely going to do build something a bit more tailored for howcast.com, but will definitely try to see if there are things that we can contribute back to that project. We humbly tip our hats to the New Bamboo team for their fantastic work.