Amazon S3 Hosting Streaming Video

Question

If I make an Amazon s3 MP4 resource publically availible and then throw the Html5 Video tag around the resource's URL will it stream? Is it really that simple. There are a lot of "encoding" api's out there such as pandastream and zencoder and I'm not sure exactly what these companies do. Do they just manage bandwidth allocation(upgrading/downgrading stream quality and delivery rate/cross-platform optimization?) Or do encoding services do more then that.

Solution 1

This is Brandon from Zencoder. What you're looking for is probably something like Video JS (videojs.com) for video playback. You can just upload an MP4 to S3 and reference it in a player (or the video tag directly, but that has additional issues). Our service is actually used for transcoding the video itself, not delivery. We actually created Video JS to help our customers (and the web at large) with easy, compatible HTML5 playback. If you have any other questions just ask. Thanks.

Solution 2

The answer to the first part of your question is, yes, it is really that simple. There is a how-to about it and a working demo at the end of the article that you can see as a proof of concept.

Solution 3

I just had the same question as you and was happy to see that uploading an mp4 file to S3, setting "public" permissions on it, and then using this simple HTML worked great without any additional tools. And CloudFront wasn't even necessary.

<video id="clip" controls preload=auto width=640 height=264 data-setup="{}">
    <source src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/xxxxbucketnamexxxxx/xxxxfilenamexxxx.mp4" type='video/mp4'/>        
</video>

Solution 4

Amazon S3 is a really good choice for serving up video content. We've been using it for a couple of years with no issues and the cost has been unbeatable. You should also look at using Amazon CloudFront and configuring your media to use their "streaming distributions". It basically uses your S3 files but copies them to edge locations around the internet and uses RTMP to provide a better playback experience for users and to save you money on bandwidth.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

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Comments

[c089]

This looks nice, but is there any way to have these performance benefits without flash? Moving from html5 video TO flash doesn't seem like the best idea to do nowadays...

[E.E.33]

@c089 very good question. I wonder the same thing. Did you find any info on doing the same with html5?

[c089]

nope, the project I was thinking about at the time never got anywhere and after that the requirement never popped up... but look at brandons answer above mentioning videojs.com :)

[cwd]

I wish videojs would offer some rtmp support, support for youtube videos, and maybe a bit more HTTP Live Streaming support and/or documentation. I love VideoJS :) and don't want to ever have to use JWPlayer :(

[channa ly]

what does it mean "Our service is actually used for transcoding the video itself" ?

[Amit Bisht]

not working, could you try again and confirm is it working?

[Peter Tao]

what are the additional issues?

[rbansal]

I am using videojs thanks for building such an awesome player. Sometimes the video buffers. Is there any possibility to prefetch the video chunks of content in parallel to reduce the buffering?