- You can read Part 2 here.
Video transcoding is one of the coolest things you can do using Amazon Web Services (AWS). This basically converts a video to a different format. There are many utilities that can transcode videos that you can download from different Web sites. Some of these utilities are even free. AWS offers two major advantages for video transcoding. AWS offers templates that make it simple to convert videos to a standard format. AWS makes it easy to convert videos to a standard format. AWS solutions are highly scalable. This is a great advantage if you have many videos to convert. Let me show you an example of how these benefits can be so compelling. As part of my spaceflight training, I had to take a class called Spacecraft Egress and Sea Survival. There were four astronaut candidates, me included. Each person brought a camera to record the training. We made a deal to share the raw footage once the class was over. What I didn’t realize was that we all came from different countries. Seriously. We were four people, and we all came from four different places. There are different video standards around the world so there wasn’t much consistency in the recordings we made. I ended up with hundreds of video clips in many formats. These clips were converted into usable formats and I was able to use them to create a video. (You can see the finished product at the end). Imagine how much faster the process would have been if I used AWS to do all the conversions manually. Let’s now take a look at AWS video transcoding. There are two main steps to the process. The first step is to set up the storage. The second step is actually converting the video. In Part 2, I will walk through the storage setup process. The AWS transcoding engine relies on Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. You will need at least two buckets. One bucket will serve as an input bucket and the other as an output bucket. While I have only shown two buckets in my example, you can create multiple output and input buckets. Log in to AWS console, then select S3 from the available services list (located in the Storage section). After logging in, you’ll be taken to the Amazon S3 screen (shown in Figure 1). [Click on the image to see a larger version.] Figure 1: This is Amazon S3’s dashboard. Click on the Get Started button to be taken to the Create Bucket screen. First, you will need to choose a name for your bucket. Although it sounds simple, you must make sure that the name you choose is unique across all AWS clouds. You will need to choose a name that is unique to your AWS cloud. In my case, I named my video source bucket poseyvideo-source. Notice that my last name (Posey), is written in all lowercase characters. This is because AWS won’t allow you to use uppercase characters in a bucket name. Select your bucket region as shown in Figure 2 and click Next. [Click on the image to see a larger view.] Figure 2: Your bucket will need a unique name. Click Next to be taken to a screen asking you to configure versioning information and tags. These items can be configured at your discretion. Once you’re done, click Next. You will now be taken to the Permissions screen. Here