Elastic Transcoder Demo
From the product page:
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is media transcoding in the cloud. It is designed to be a highly scalable, easy to use and a cost effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.
Why Elastic Transcoder? Why can't I just use my own hardware to transcode the video files.
It comes down to scalability and ease-of-use.
Suppose you are developing a high-traffic e-learning application. On spurts you get hundreds of students who, all at the same time, upload their assessment submissions in the form of video files. Thing is, they have neither time nor the patience to know how transcoding and file size compression works. They just want to upload straight from their phones.
A bunch of them upload uncompressed videos in varying formats and containers (e.g. mp4, avi, mkv). What's even startling is that some of these videos reach up to 500mb. Your server doesn't have that much local storage.
The solution to this is Elastic Transcoder (ET). With ET, you only pay for the resources you use -- AWS does convoluted process of:
- Transcoding the files into a common container format,
- Compressing them to reasonable file sizes, and
- Storing the files in the cloud (via S3)
As seen on the Auckland AWS meetup.
