AWS Elastic Transcoder

What is AWS Elastic Transcoder ?

AWS 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.
AWS Elastic Transcoder is a highly scalable, easy to use and cost effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) video and audio files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.
It supports a wide range of input and output formats, resolutions, bitrates, and frame rates. Also offers features for automatic video bit rate optimization, generation of thumbnails, overlay of visual watermarks, caption support, DRM packaging, progressive downloads, encryption and more.
Picks up files from an input S3 bucket and saves the output to an output S3 bucket.
Uses a JSON API, and SDKs are provided for Python, Node.js, Java, .NET, PHP, and Ruby.
Provides transcoding presets for popular formats.
You are charged based on the duration of the content and the resolution or format of the media.
Elastic Transcoder is an aws service used to convert the media files stored in an S3 bucket into the media files in different formats supported by different devices.
Elastic Transcoder is a media transcoder in the cloud.
It is used to convert media files from their original source format into different formats that will play on smartphones, tablets, PC’s, etc.
It provides transcoding presets for popular output formats means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices.
If you use Elastic Transcoder, then you need to pay based on the minutes that you transcode and the resolution at which you transcode.

Components of AWS Elastic Transcoder

Elastic Transcoder consists of four components:

  1. Jobs
  2. Pipelines
  3. Presets
  4. Notifications

1. Jobs

The main task of the job is to complete the work of transcoding. Each job can convert a file up to 30 formats. For example, if you want to convert a media file into eight different formats, then a single job creates files in eight formats. When you create a job, you need to specify the name of the file that you want to transcode.

2. Pipelines

Pipelines are the queues that consist of your transcoding jobs. When you create a job, then you need to specify which pipeline you want to add your job. If you want a job to create more than one format, Elastic Transcoder creates the files for each format in the order you specify the formats in a job.
You can create either of the two pipelines, i.e., standard-priority jobs and high-priority jobs. Mainly jobs go into the standard-priority jobs. Sometimes you want to transcode the file immediately; the high-priority pipeline is used.

3. Presets

Presets are the templates that contain the settings for transcoding the media file from one format to another format. Elastic transcoder consists of some default presets for common formats. You can also create your own presets that are not included in the default presets. You need to specify a preset that you want to use when you create a job.

4. Notifications

Notification is an optional field which you can configure with the Elastic Transcoder. Notification Service is a service that keeps you updated with the status of your job: when Elastic Transcoder starts processing your job, when Elastic Transcoder finishes its job, whether the Elastic Transcoder encounters an error condition or not. You can configure Notifications when you create a pipeline.

Elastic Transcoder features

  1. It can be used to convert files from different media formats into H.264/AAC/MP4 files at different resolutions, bitrates, and frame rates, and set up transcoding pipelines to transcode files in parallel.
  2. It can be configured to overlay up to four graphics, known as watermarks, over a video during transcoding.
  3. It can be configured to transcode captions, or subtitles, from one format to another and supports embedded and sidebar caption types.
  4. It provides clip stitching ability to stitch together parts, or clips, from multiple input files to create a single output.
  5. It can be configured to create Thumbnails.
  6. Elastic Transcoder is integrated with CloudTrail, an AWS service that captures information about every request that is sent to the Elastic Transcoder API by your AWS account, including your IAM users.

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