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AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#4

Post by zimbatm »

hayksaakian wrote: post #2

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....

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.

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#6

Post by zimbatm »

JosephRedfern wrote: post #3

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

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.

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#7

Post by shortsightedsid »

zimbatm wrote: post #6
JosephRedfern wrote: post #3

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

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. W…

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.

Re: AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder

#9

Post by zimbatm »

shortsightedsid wrote: post #7
zimbatm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. W…

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 supp…

We're not talking about broadcasting but transcoding, which is a very different workload.

FFmpeg is used by Youtube, Vimeo, ZenCoder, Transload-it and PandaStream (where I'm working at) to transform the videos. Hardware encoders are great for a specific target but FFmpeg just supports most the rubbish video formats that customers like to throw at us.

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