Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a highly scalable, easy-to-use and cost-effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) video files from their source format into versions that will play back on multiple devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Elastic Transcoder is for any customer with media assets stored in S3.

Elastic Transcoder features

1. Can be used to convert files from different media formats into H.264/AAC/MP4 files at different resolutions, bitrates, and frame rates, and set up transcoding pipelines to transcode files in parallel.

2. Can be configured to overlay up to four graphics, known as watermarks, over a video during transcoding.

3. Can be configured to transcode captions, or subtitles, from one format to another and supports embedded and sidebar caption types.

4. Provides clip stitching ability to stitch together parts, or clips, from multiple input files to create a single output.

5. Can be configured to create Thumbnails.

Elastic Transcoder is integrated with CloudTrail, an AWS service that captures information about every request that is sent to the Elastic Transcoder API by your AWS account, including your IAM users.

Presets

1. Are templates that contain most of the settings for transcoding media files from one format to another.

2. Elastic Transcoder includes some default presets for common formats and ability to create customized presets.

Jobs

1. Do the work of transcoding and converts a file into up to 30 formats.

2. Takes the input file to be transcoded, names of the transcoded files and several other settings as input.

3. For each transcoded format a preset needs to be specified.

Pipelines

1. Are queues that manage the transcoding jobs.

2. Elastic Transcoder starts processing the jobs and transcoding into format (for multiple formats) in the order they are added.

3. Can be paused to temporarily stop processing jobs.

Notifications

1. Help keep you apprised of the status of a job, i.e. started, completed, encounters warning or error.

2. Eliminate the need for polling to determine when a job has finished and can be configured during pipeline creation.

Elastic Transcoder Example