Amazon Elastic Transcoder Announces Seven New Enhancements, Including HLS Support

Posted on: May 16, 2013

We’re excited to announce seven new enhancements to Amazon Elastic Transcoder that make it easier for you to encode and deliver your content to a wider set of video devices and players. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a web service that converts your video files into versions that will play back on devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs and web browsers.

Starting today you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to output content in three new ways:

  • HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support lets you create videos that play on compatible players for Apple iOS, Android devices, set-top boxes and web browsers. With HLS support, you can now easily deliver your content without a streaming server – just point your users to the video in Amazon S3 or Amazon CloudFront.
  • WebM support lets you transcode content into VP8 video and Vorbis audio for playback in browsers, like Firefox, that do not natively support H.264 and AAC.
  • MPEG-2 TS output container support lets you output transport streams that are commonly used in broadcast systems.

We’ve also added four features that make it even easier to use Amazon Elastic Transcoder:

  • Multiple outputs per job make it easy to create different renditions of the same content. Instead of having to create one transcoding job per rendition, you can now create a single job to produce multiple renditions. For example, with a single job you can create H.264, HLS and WebM versions of the same video for delivery to multiple platforms.
  • Automatic video bit rate optimization takes the guesswork out of choosing the right bit rate for your video content. With this feature, Amazon Elastic Transcoder will automatically adjust the bit rate in order to optimize the visual quality of your transcoded output.
  • Enhanced aspect ratio and sizing policies make it easier to resize your content to your output frame size. You can use these new settings in transcoding presets to precisely control scaling, cropping, matting and stretching options to get the output that you expect regardless of how the input is formatted.
  • Integration with Amazon S3 permissions and storage options lets you set permissions on your output files from within Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Your files are then created with the right permissions in-place, ready for delivery to end-users.

You can learn more about Amazon Elastic Transcoder and these new features by visiting the detail page. To see these new features in action, don’t forget to register for the “What’s New with Amazon Elastic Transcoder” webinar on May 29, 2013 at 10am Pacific time.