New Features for the Amazon Elastic Transcoder

We released the Amazon Elastic Transcoder with an initial set of features and a promise to iterate quickly based on customer feedback. You’ve supplied us with plenty of feedback (primarily via the Elastic Transcoder Forum) and have a set of powerful enhancements ready as a result.

Here’s what’s new:

• Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) Support. Amazon Elastic Transcoder can create HLS-compliant pre-segmented files and playlists for delivery to compatible players on iOS and Android devices, set-top boxes and web browsers. You can use our new system-defined HLS presets to transcode an input file into adaptive-bitrate filesets for targeting multiple devices, resolutions and bitrates.  You can also create your own presets.
  
  
• WebM Output Support. Amazon Elastic Transcoder can now transcode content into VP8 video and Vorbis audio, for playback in browsers, like Firefox, that do not natively support H.264 and AAC.
  
  
• MPEG2-TS Output Container Support. Amazon Elastic Transcoder can now transcode content into transport stream containing H.264 video and AAC audio, which are commonly used in broadcast systems.
• Multiple Outputs Per Job. Amazon Elastic Transcoder can now produce multiple renditions of the same input from a single transcoding job. For example, with a single job you can create H.264, HLS and WebM versions of the same video for delivery to multiple platforms, which is easier than creating multiple jobs and saves you time.
  
  
• Automatic Video Bit rate Optimization. With this feature, Amazon Elastic Transcoder will automatically adjust the bit rate in order to optimize the visual quality of your transcoded output. This takes the guesswork out of choosing the right bit rate for your video content.
  
  
• Enhanced Aspect Ratio and Sizing Policies. 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.
  
  
• Enhanced S3 Options for Output Videos. Amazon Elastic Transcoder now enables you to set S3 Access Control Lists (ACLs) and storage type options without needing to use the Amazon S3 API or console. By using this feature, your files are then created with the right permissions in-place, ready for delivery to end-users.
  

To learn more about these features, visit the Elastic Transcoder Documentation and sign up for our free What’s New with Amazon Elastic Transcoder webinar. The webinar will be held on May 29th at 10 AM PT.

As usual, these features are availble now and you can start using them today.

— Jeff;