Amazon Elastic Transcoder Update – New Formats & Conversion Controls

Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts (transcodes) media (video and audio) files into renditions optimized for playback on desktops, mobile devices, tablets, and televisions.

Today, we are making Elastic Transcoder even more useful! We’ve added support for generating NTSC outputs (the television standard used in the United States and Canada), and PAL outputs (the standard used in most other countries), and we are also adding new formats for the web.

New Formats
Here are the new formats:

• FLV container with H.264 video and AAC or MP3 audio
• MPG container with MPEG-2 video and MP2 audio
• Animated GIF

To support NTSC and PAL , we have added support for the MPEG – 2 MPEG-2 video, audio, and program stream container, extended our color space support, and added options for interlacing. You can generate output that is compliant with PAL or NTSC by selecting the appropriate system preset.

For the web, we’ve added animated GIF and FLV outputs. Animated GIF files work natively in most browsers, whereas FLV allows you to reach devices via their Flash plugin. The FLV packaging is optimized to work with the Flash media player. By packing into this format, you can more easily reach older devices not capable of being reached by more recent formats. Together these features allow you to reach a wider range of devices, including legacy browsers and televisions. Here’s a sample animated GIF:

 New Console Options
The ETS Console has been updated to support the new presets, codecs, and options. Here is how you select one of the new presets:

Here is how you choose a codec:

If you are generating an animated GIF you can set the number of times that the animation will play:

— Jeff;