AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/

by jrnkntl • 13 years ago

41 16 13 years ago

aws.amazon.com

Interesting. Could something like this be used to live stream video?

Edit: at those rates, streaming to 1000 people for an hour would cost you 1800 dollars. I can't see that being worthwhile....

zimbatm3• 13 years ago

It's not the same constraints.

With video transcoding you push batch jobs that can be processed at any time. The video is taken from a S3 bucket and the result is put back in another place. When transforming the video you might use some heuristics on the whole file (because some formats have the metadata at the end). You can also implement fallbacks when the transcoding fails.

With live streaming you need to acquire a streaming video source, transform it in real-time and forward the stream without too much latency and without failure. Then you need to push that stream to the N connected people possibly fanning-out the traffic to multiple servers to dispatch the load.

byoung22• 13 years ago

Interesting. Could something like this be used to live stream video?

Amazon already offers live video streaming at a much lower price:

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/#Does_Amazon_CloudFron...

JosephRedfern• 13 years ago

Seems quite expensive to me. Wouldn't it be cheaper to roll your own on a (few) EC2 instances?

zimbatm3• 13 years ago

Most people underestimate the cost of handling FFmpeg and all it's particularities and the complexities inherent to each video format. Especially if you support "any" format on the input you quickly end up spending a lot of time dealing with heuristics (which evolve with each FFmpeg release). Development and learning time might be a bigger cost than the potential savings.

The target format is also really important. WebM is around twice as slow to encode than h264 for the same resolution. And HD doubles the encoding time as well.

Now if you look at the Spot instance market, you can have a c1.xlarge for $0.07 / hour. Given that you can encode ~6 h264 SD videos in near real-time on that instance, it would cost you ~0.0002 / minute of video (if you don't need other infrastructure services). This is the bottom-line.

shortsightedsid• 13 years ago

Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized software. Take a look at http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-and-S....

FFMPEG is great for personal use but unlikely to be used in production systems.

1. Its not "enterprisy". By that mean there is company behind the codecs who can provide support 24x7 on quality issues, robustness, warrenties etc.. 2. The ugly word - Patent covered. A lot of video technology has licensing and patenting. The moment sometime as big as Amazon tries to use a codec, the sharks will line up unless they have the right license.

jfb2• 13 years ago

Digital video experience isn't cheap.

sp3322• 13 years ago

Unless I'm missing something, this is nothing that can't already be done by http://Zencoder.com

terpua• 13 years ago

Pay as you go pricing

HD @zencoder: $0.10 per minute HD @AET: $0.03 per minute

sp3322• 13 years ago

Ok, thanks :)

13rules• 13 years ago

AWS is cheaper as terpua mentioned... but Zencoder has been awesome for us. Easy to set up and our video processes have been running with zero problems.

AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

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