
Amazon Elastic Transcoder - Watermarking, Bit / Frame Rate Control - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/07/amazon-elastic-transcoder-watermarking-bit-frame-rate-control.html
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DenisM
I'd love for there to be an AWS _photo_ transcoding service as well. If you
have a large site, creating your own photo transcoder workflow is not a big
deal, and you can make it elastic by combining a bunch of other AWS services,
but for a small web site it's a different picture.

For me photo transcoding comes in batches that take 5-15 minutes to process, a
few times per week. This work bogs down the tiny instance, so I have to keep
around a medium instance just for the occasional conversion work, but 99% of
the time it's a waste of hardware. It's also a waste of my time having to
write code to deal with things like iPhone picture image rotation and so on.

~~~
IanCal
Have you looked at PiCloud? It looks like exactly the base you want to build
on. They run AWS instances, but charge by the millisecond. You can run one up
just for the 5-15 minutes it takes.

Or if you want to get fancier, try their queues [0], they've got an example of
doing image processing to explain how it works. Essentially, you set up your
processing pipeline attached to a queue. You then drop messages on the queue
whenever you want to do work, and they spin up one or many machines
(controllable by you) to process the data. Then after 20 seconds of nothing
new appearing on the queue, they turn them all off.

They'll even give you 20 hours of compute time free, every month.

Edit - if you don't want to build it, drop me a message, I can do it.

[0] [http://blog.picloud.com/2013/04/03/introducing-queues-
creati...](http://blog.picloud.com/2013/04/03/introducing-queues-creating-a-
pipeline-in-the-cloud/)

~~~
DenisM
I'll spend some more time on it, but right now it looks like another platform
I need to learn, which I don't have time for.

What I want is a service that takes this URL and returns a resized JPG:

    
    
      http://SimpleImageService.com/resize
      ?account=DenisM
      &source=http://s3.amazonaws.com/DenisMsPictures/Image1.TIFF
      &size=400x400
    

That's it. I'll drop this into my app and forget about it. Set the prices at
your AWS cost + 25%, and send me the bill at the end of each month.

~~~
madlag
That's exactly what Stupeflix Tasks will do in a few weeks, along with video
thumbnails strips, thumbnailing of videos at any point in time, video uploads,
audio waveform, text to speech, video reverse etc. The beta doc is at
[https://stupeflix-tasks-
api.readthedocs.org/en/latest/versio...](https://stupeflix-tasks-
api.readthedocs.org/en/latest/versions/index.html) , feel free to give me some
feedback on it ! And if you want to do way more than just transcode, but
create completely your video from images / music / videos , you can use the
video rendering service at
[http://developer.stupeflix.com/](http://developer.stupeflix.com/) . It will
migrated to the Tasks api too.

(Disclaimer : I am the CTO )

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gtaylor
The big thing that's tripping us up with using Elastic Transcoder is that
there's no way to see how much billed time each encoding job took. We factor
our encoding time in to what we bill our customers.

They've been iterating quickly and we're so close to being able to use this,
but the billing thing is a big hurdle for us.

~~~
dsayed
Amazon Elastic Transcoder provides the video duration for transcoded jobs
through the API and the AWS Management Console. See
[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1958](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1958)
for more info.

~~~
gtaylor
As an addendum for everyone else, the ET team has been super helpful, and is
much more active in their support forums than most of the other AWS teams.
These guys seem eager to earn your business, and have iterated quickly.

Big thanks goes to them for moving fast, getting involved, and acting
[quickly] on user feedback.

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tyw
If there's anyone out there watching, I would love it if there were a similar
AWS service just for audio transcoding (mp3, flac, etc.). Obviously I don't
know what all is happening behind the scenes, but it seems to me that a lot of
the infrastructure would be reusable.

~~~
ewillbefull
I would also love it if streaming transcoding were possible with this API.

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infogulch
Would this support streaming? What about multiple outputs?

A bunch of gamers have issues live streaming to youtube and twitch. Each
requires special (different) encoding parameters for streaming, and youtube
needs each resolution streamed separately. This, along with separate streams
for twitch and youtube murders most people's bandwidth not to mention a home
computer's encoding capacity.

Most of the time they end up choosing only one site and a specific resolution
and miss out on a large portion of their fan base. (People have a wide range
of quality preferences/bandwidth requirements, in addition to being on
different sites.)

Someone should use this to build a super easy multi-output streaming
transcoder for youtube / twitch.tv / etc.

~~~
Terretta
> _...have issues live streaming to youtube and twitch. Each requires special
> (different) encoding parameters for streaming, and youtube needs each
> resolution streamed separately. This, along with separate streams for twitch
> and youtube..._

This isn't a sales pitch so much as an offer to chat about it and see if we
could help turn a service we provide into a product that meets this need.

For years we've provided this as a "private label" service to major media
companies that need to provide one single broadcast quality live stream and
have it delivered to thousands or hundreds of thousands of end users on
Windows and OSX (RTMP), Android (RTSP), and iOS (HLS), in bitrates ranging
from 300 kbps to 6 megabits, while also pushing the full array of bitrates to
YouTube, Hulu, etc.

The problem is that this is not cheap. Pulling it off with low latency and
across a full array of formats and protocols tends to require dedicated
hardware (depends on the source material, talking heads easier than sports,
for example). But our approach does cost significantly less than trying to use
AWS instances, and if the community of broadcasters or viewers was large
enough, it might make sense for us to open up this private label service to
individuals.

Feel free to ping me if someone wants to talk about it.

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akoumjian
If the team is reading this thread: we cannot find a transcoding service that
will output to intermediary codecs (non interframe codecs). We need to take 4k
video in photojpeg, red, and prores and at least turn that into different
resolutions of photojpeg. The output videos need to be of sufficient quality
to use to produce commercial video, though not necessarily at the full 4k (or
higher) res.

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manishsharan
I wonder what strategies will be used by video start-ups who seem to be using
AWS EC2 to cope with unexpected competition from AWS. AWS Transcoder seems to
be getting better and their rates are pretty aggressive.

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mustafakidd
I am obviously behind since I didn't know about this service, but does anyone
know whether they offer any sort of audio watermarking similar to the video
watermarking service?

~~~
dsayed
By audio watermarking, do you mean corrupting the audio with periods of
silence/tone/noise that repeat, or do you mean a forensic watermark for audio
fingerprinting purposes?

~~~
mustafakidd
I meant mixing in a looping track the length of the main track ("brought to
you by Mr X's Audio Tool", "this is a SAMPLE...", etc)

