Working with Encoding.com, Amazon S3 and Cloudfront

Posted by Derrick on July 2, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

Working with Encoding.com, Amazon S3 and Cloudfront is what I had a chance to do recently. It was nice to work with the Encoding.com encoding service again. This service can make things extremely easy for novices especially if you have someone to set up encoding presets and other items for you. It terms of compression, I generally like to be up close and personal on the desktop with my compression tools but there are some things that I like about the Encoding.com service.

Project Goal: To provide a great viewing experience for 80 minute video lessons with Real-Time Streaming. The videos needed to play without interruption. Also we needed to provide 1-2 minute videos for Progressive Download.

Here are the tools used for the project:

Amazon S3
Amazon Cloudfront
Rackspace Cloud
Encoding.com
JW Player

Because of the project we decided to go with delivering Real-time Streaming of the 80 minute lessons with Amazon Cloudfront and Amazon S3. We also used the Cloudfront and S3 for the Progessive Downloads. What nice is the Amazon Cloudfront uses Adobe Flash Media Servers for Real Time Streaming. For delivery we implemented On-demand Dynamic Streaming for Real-time Streaming and went with a single datarate video for Progressive Download. We used 5 different dates for different types of viewers and the video dynamically switches based on users bandwidth. Rackspace was used for the source file location and JW Player was used for both Real-time and Progressive Download playback of the Flash video content.

Here’s what I liked about Encoding.com:

  • Watch Folder Encoding
  • FTP or Amazon S3 locations can be specified for Watch Folders
  • Videos can be sent to FTP or Amazon S3 locations after encoding
  • The ability to view encoding jobs in the Encoding Queue
  • Watch Encoding Log

Here’s what I’d like to see improved with Encoding.com:

  • The ability to specify naming conventions for Watch Folders
  • The ability to apply multiple presets to Watch Folders
  • More compression filters available

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