AWS Elastic Transcoder

• 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 for e.g. developers creating apps or websites that publish user-generated content, enterprises and educational establishments converting training and communication videos, and content owners and broadcasters needing to convert media assets into web-friendly formats.
• Elastic Transcoder features
  • 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.
  • can be configured to overlay up to four graphics, known as watermarks, over a video during transcoding
  • can be configured to transcode captions, or subtitles, from one format to another and supports embedded and sidebar caption types
  • provides clip stitching ability to stitch together parts, or clips, from multiple input files to create a single output
  • 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

Elastic Transcoder Components

• Presets
  • are templates that contain most of the settings for transcoding media files from one format to another.
  • Elastic Transcoder includes some default presets for common formats and ability to create customized presets
• Jobs
  • do the work of transcoding and converts a file into up to 30 formats.
  • takes the input file to be transcoded, names of the transcoded files and several other settings as input
  • For each transcoded format a preset needs to be specified
• Pipelines
  • are queues that manage the transcoding jobs.
  • Elastic Transcoder starts processing the jobs and transcoding into format (for multiple formats) in the order they are added.
  • can be paused to temporarily stop processing jobs
• Notifications
  • help keep you apprised of the status of a job, i.e. started, completed, encounters warning or error
  • eliminate the need for polling to determine when a job has finished and can be configured during pipeline creation

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

1. Your website is serving on-demand training videos to your workforce. Videos are uploaded monthly in high resolution MP4 format. Your workforce is distributed globally often on the move and using company-provided tablets that require the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol to watch a video. Your company has no video transcoding expertise and it required you might need to pay for a consultant. How do you implement the most cost-efficient architecture without compromising high availability and quality of video delivery?
   1. Elastic Transcoder to transcode original high-resolution MP4 videos to HLS. S3 to host videos with lifecycle Management to archive original flies to Glacier after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from S3
   2. A video transcoding pipeline running on EC2 using SQS to distribute tasks and Auto Scaling to adjust the number or nodes depending on the length of the queue S3 to host videos with Lifecycle Management to archive all files to Glacier after a few days CloudFront to serve HLS transcoding videos from Glacier
   3. Elastic Transcoder to transcode original high-resolution MP4 videos to HLS EBS volumes to host videos and EBS snapshots to incrementally backup original rues after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from EC2.
   4. A video transcoding pipeline running on EC2 using SQS to distribute tasks and Auto Scaling to adjust the number of nodes depending on the length of the queue. EBS volumes to host videos and EBS snapshots to incrementally backup original files after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from EC2

References

• Elastic_Transcoder_Developer_Guide