Amazon Elastic Transcoder Insights

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a cloud based transcoding service which offers scalability in resource intensive transcoding jobs. But before diving into details of Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Let’s understand what is ‘transcoding’. Transcoding process involves conversion of your video files into various formats so that they can be viewed on different devices and platforms across the globe.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a transcoder with no upfront cost or installation requirement on the Amazon Cloud. It let’s the stored media files in Amazon S3 to be converted into media files in the format required by the customers playback device.

Let’s study the working of Amazon Elastic Transcoder:

1. Under AWS Management Console, upload the media files on S3 bucket i.e. Simple Storage Service bucket.

2. Create the pipelines and enable them to connect to the input and output buckets of S3. You can have n- no. of pipelines in parallel set-up for high and low priority jobs

3. Whose so ever has access to the data, have option to set up IAM (Identity and Access Management)

4. Next comes setting up the transcoding job, that means you will select the files to be transcoded.

5. You can either have your own custom presets or choose from a variety of formats of presets

6. Amazon Elastic Transcoder gives option to check the job progress and notifications.

7. Once done, upload the media files from S3 output bucket to your storage devices or distribute using CDN.

Components of Elastic Transcoder by Amazon:

Jobs: While creating a job, you indicate the name of the media file that needs to be transcoded. The specified name will be used by the Elastic Transcoder to give to the transcoded media files and to several other settings. Along with this, you also specify a template for each format that needs to be transcoded into this is termed as preset. Preset contains the audio and video settings that you need for the transcoded files. Each and every job can convert one file into at most 30 formats. That means in case you convert a file into n- no. of different formats then you can create files in all n- no. of formats by creating a single job.

Pipelines: The queue of transcoding job is managed under pipeline. While creating a job, you mention to which pipeline you are adding the job. Incase a job needs n-formats then elastic transcoder process the job and creates the files for each and every format in the order it is created. The size of the files will determine the transcoding time and also you have option to pause a pipeline job.

Presets:  Presets are the templates with some default settings for media files transcoding. While creating a job, you specify the preset you want to use from the default or you create your own preset if it’s not included in default presets. For some common formats, Elastic Transcoder offers some default presets to transcode the file from one format to another.

Notifications: While creating a pipeline, you can configure notifications. Optionally, it let you configure Elastic Transcoder and Amazon Simple Notification Service. This helps you to get notification about the status of a job. The notification might include: Starting of the job, ending of the job or whether Elastic Transcoder encounters warning or error conditions during processing.

Conclusion:

Amazon Elastic Transcoder has certain limitations as well. It doesn't offer many popular input formats (no ProRes, RED, etc), no captions, etc. The source of Media files and delivery of transcoded files are restricted to cloud. So, delivery is additional cost and overhead. Some experts believe that the quality of transcoded media is not the best in class. So, overall for very large media producers, this Amazon Elastic Transcoder might not be the best choice. Rest can use it comfortably.

    At Oodles, we offer consulting on Transcoding Solutions and also customization on Cloud based Transcoding services like Amazon Elastic Transcoder. We create custom Transcoding Services using FFMPEG. We customize, integrate and analyze end-to-end transcoding setup using Amazon Elastic Transcoder.