Amazon Elastic Transcoder – What It Is and How To Use It
This week Amazon shook up the web video world with the release of a new service called Amazon Elastic Transcoder.
What does it do? It basically gives anyone a fast, easy and cheap way to make their videos playable on the web and mobile devices.
While similar services from competitors have been available for years, Amazon Elastic Transcoder offers simplicity, pay-as-you-go-pricing and automatic integration into Amazon S3.
So is Amazon Elastic Transcoder for you? Watch this short video for the answer…and to see it in action.
Have questions about it? Just leave a comment below.
Share This
Dave, SO glad you covered this! Got the email announcement from Amazon earlier this week but was wanting some kind of tutorial, so thank you!
Great Overview as usual Dave. I always look forward to your offerings here, just selfishly wish they happened more often. I might have missed this new AMZ service if not for your email. Thanks for another great contribution.
Meant to ask you Dave…do you know if there a list somewhere of file types which can be uploaded?
I have some older SWF videos I’d like to be able to easily convert to MP4 format for play across all devices (including non-flash.
Thanks in advance!
@Jeff – I haven’t seen a list of supported file types, probably because it’s still in beta. I would assume since they are competing with Encoding.com, Zencoder, etc. that they would support just about all file types though. The quickest way to find out would be to trying transcoding a SWF, etc. file.
Great video Dave!
I have VideoRebel, would this be a good option to utilize with it?
Also, are you planning any updates for videorebel, such as an autoplay option etc…?
Thanks!
@Peter – Elastic Transcoder won’t work with Video Rebel (VR only works with Zencoder). We don’t have any plans on updating VR at this point.
Your video stops at 3 min. 47 sec.
@Stan – The video is fine…that usually means your browser’s cache is full and you need to clear it:
http://webvideouniversity.com/video-help/
Hi, Dave – just wanted to register my disappointment that you won’t be updating VR to take advantage of the Amazon transcoder service. Seems like the natural thing to do…
I second that Dave… Video Rebel is a great software
Very good video Dave.
After I completed all the steps as described in your video, I copy the Embed code, and paste into my email. Would the video play when someone receives my email and click on the link? Or the video only plays on a website?
As always Dave, great and very informational video. I love using S3 and this has just solved a problem I had a with a Canon recording.
I just bought Easy Video Suite wich is also supposed to be able to do the same, as well as edit the video and heaps of other features.
At which stage in this S3 conversion process would you suggest the editing etc takes place?
I would have thought before the conversion. but now seems that perhaps after!
@Dave I know your not a big fan of using a lot of others peoples’ software…but have you looked at Easy Video Suite? I don’t have it yet but I would like to your opinion because it looks like it does all this and makes it a lot easier.
Can you check that out and give some honest feedback?
Thanks Dave,
Tobey
Hi Tobey, everyone,
I can testify that Easy Video Suite (EVS)is great as I have it and been using it extensively but, honestly, do not rely on it to transcode your videos unless you’re dealing with a very short video. I’ve tried EVS with 20-minute or longer videos and the transcoding process took forever and is not reliable.
I recommend that you to use Amazon Management Console to upload your videos and transcode them using the Amazon Elastic Transcoder.
Now if you want to go the cheap (actually free) route, Handbrake (google it) does a very decent job for me as I use it almost everyday with great satisfaction.
If you make screen-casting videos through Camtasia, you honestly do not need any other encoding software or cloud-based service for your trancoding jobs.
The current Camtasia (Camtasia
does the job masterfully using the adequate presets you set up yourself when producing your videos and the videos will be web-optimized.
Just so that you know: I have hundreds of videos online.
Finally, I must say that Dave’s various web video courses have been a blessing to me.
So let’s give full credit to him.
I really hope my experience will help you make the right decision.
Thanks,
Asan.
Wonderful. Thank a lot for posting this. I will definitely return to this site to see what’s new and recommend my people about you.