RipCode, the Texas-based video equipment manufacturer, today announced the availability of its RipCode V4 video transcoding appliance, which delivers on-demand video content to any viewing medium, while reducing server hardware, storage and energy use. RipCode also released the name of its first client – MySpace, which recently completed a trial run with the company.

“It’s a new way of performing transcoding, and it should revolutionize the way users get access to video content,” said RipCode founder and CEO Brendon Mills. “The issue today is that there are so many video files that a company--and it could be MySpace or anyone else--cannot precode that content to every single format so that they can view it on every single viewing medium or screen.”

Mills cited MySpace and YouTube as examples of companies that, at present, only transcode their content into one format for the PC screen. Viewing these companies’ videos – most between two and 30 minutes – on a mobile phone or over a video-on-demand solution would require transcoding the content into a number of different formats, sometimes upwards of 100. RipCode’s transcoding solution gives users access to the content without pre-transcoding the file. The whole process takes less time than it would take to spool up a streaming connection, Mills said.

“Essentially, we only transcode when the user requests that particular screen format,” Mills said. “And we can perform that transcode at user speed. So this allows you to oversubscribe your transcoding resources and only use them when a user requests a transcoded file.”

RipCode’s goal for its transcoding solution is to create a hierarchy of how to handle transcoded content, Mills said. The most valuable content – such as popular episodes of Lost or Desperate Housewives – will still be precoded, but videos lower on the long tail will be held for on-demand or free-market transcode. This is where RipCode comes in.

“It is on-demand transcoding, but essentially it’s driven purely by the user’s request,” Mills said. “It is almost kind of a flash crowd mentality. Any file can be popular at any moment if something happens in the world. We allow that file to be transcoded on demand if that happens, especially if it is down the tail of content.”

The V4 video transcoding appliance uses consolidated, high-concurrency processing to lower physical barriers that restrict content from being viewed on multiple viewing mediums, supplant existing servers and reduce overall hardware, storage and energy usage. The appliance supports file-to-file and stream-to-stream transcoding in a single appliance. One RipCode unit replaces approximately 10 to 20 general purpose servers, allowing video companies to more efficiently reach audiences on multiple screens.

“All these customers are expanding in basically all directions,” said Mills. “The first generation of YouTube and MySpace was to provide the video to the PC screen. Now to get access to more eyeballs, they are expanding not only to mobile phones, but also to other screens such as TV and other types of online video content. These guys are cross-marketing across screens.”

Prior to founding RipCode in 2005, Mills was the CEO and founder of telecommunications company General Bandwidth. Wanting to move into the Internet space, Mills founded RipCode intent on capitalizing on the opportunity that the Internet was bringing to video.

“This technology and this customer base is very, very new,” Mills said. “We consider ourselves one of the first communication equipment companies to build a solution specifically for this space. With the customers and the market being so new and the volume of videos just now presenting this problem, we are really the first to identify it and provide a solution for it.”

In addition to MySpace, RipCode is in the process of installing in more than 30 other customer sites. Mills said to expect many other customer announcements before the end of the year.