Amazon Elastic Transcoder Announces Extended HLS Support

Posted on: Oct 13, 2014

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create outputs for adaptive streaming, compatible with version 4 of the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. This expands on version 3 capabilities by adding support for byte-range requests, late-binding audio, and I-frame only playback.

Playlists with byte-range requests let you use just a single file per bit rate, which eliminates the need to manage thousands of small segment files. Late-binding audio allows the audio to be streamed separately from the video, which eliminates redundant storage. I-frame only playback enables trick-play modes that enhance fast-forward, rewind, and seeking through the video.

To produce HLS v4 output for your assets, simply use video-only and audio-only presets and select the "HLSv4" option for the playlist format when creating a transcoding job. Amazon Elastic Transcoder determines the byte ranges, the groupings of audio and video, the location of the I-frames, the file layouts, and all the other details for you. Like before, Amazon Elastic Transcoder outputs your media content to an Amazon S3 bucket. You can then easily deliver this content through a CDN like Amazon CloudFront to your end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds without the need for you to setup and manage third party media-streaming servers. These new outputs play on players compatible with HLS protocol version 4 such as iOS 5+ and Android 4.4+ devices.

There are no additional charges for creating HLS v4 outputs. You pay the standard transcoding, storage and delivery rates.

To learn more, please see the blog post and documentation.