What solutions are available for processing video-on-demand content on AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides two media solutions to cost-effectively deliver video-on-demand (VOD) content to global audiences using the AWS Cloud. The Video on Demand on AWS solution, and the Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution both provision the AWS services required to build scalable, distributed VOD processing and delivery workflows. This page provides guidance to choose the streaming solution that best fits your needs.
Video on Demand on AWS Foundation
This solution is designed to help you quickly get started encoding video files with AWS Elemental MediaConvert. It can be easily customized and used as the starting point to create a more complex workflow.
Out of the box, this solution enables you to accomplish the following:
Automatically transcode videos uploaded to S3 into formats suitable for playback on a wide range of devices.
Easily customize MediaConvert job settings by uploading your own file and using different job settings for different inputs.
Store transcoded files in a destination bucket and use Amazon CloudFront to deliver to end viewers.
In addition to the transcoded video, the outputs include input file metadata, job settings, and output details. These outputs are stored in a separate JSON file that can be used for further processing.
Video on Demand on AWS
This solution extends the Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution with additional features and several options that can be customized.
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This solution provides the following features:
Amazon Step Functions orchestration of the ingest, transcoding (including pre-and post-processing steps), and publishing steps of the workflow.
Choice of video file or metadata file trigger.
Delivery of videos to viewers with Amazon CloudFront, formatted for playback on a wide range of devices.
Input file metadata, job settings, and output details storage in a DynamoDB table for easy access by downstream consumers.
Optional automated archive of video inputs to help reduce storage costs.
With this solution, you can also choose to use AWS Elemental MediaPackage for packaging content into different formats and to apply encryption. MediaPackage can reduce storage costs for the outputs; however, there is a trade-off between packaging costs and storage costs.
Video on Demand on AWS Foundation Solutions Implementation overview
The diagram below presents the serverless architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.
MediaConvert transcodes the source video into multiple adaptive bitrate outputs including HLS, DASH, and MP4 formats, which are stored in the destination S3 bucket. An Amazon CloudFront distribution is deployed for global distribution of the transcoded content with the destination S3 bucket as the origin.
An Amazon CloudWatch Events notification is configured to trigger the job complete Lambda function, which stores all of the job settings and CloudFront URLs for the MediaConvert outputs in a manifest file in the source S3 bucket.
Video on Demand on AWS Solutions Implementation overview
The diagram below presents the serverless architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.
A Step Functions workflow ingests a source video, or a source video and metadata file, validates the source files, and generates metadata on the source video. A second Step Functions workflow generates an encoding profile based on the metadata and submits encoding jobs to AWS Elemental MediaConvert. After the video is encoded, a third Step Functions workflow validates the output.
AWS Elemental MediaConvert uses two-pass encoding to generate multiple high-quality versions of the original file. Source and destination media files are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and file metadata is stored in Amazon DynamoDB. If enabled, source files are tagged to allow the files to be moved to Amazon Glacier using an Amazon S3 lifecycle policy.
The solution also includes the option to use AWS Elemental MediaPackage as part of the workflow. When enabled, the solution creates a separate set of MediaConvert custom templates, and a packaging group in MediaPackage that is configured to ingest the MediaConvert HLS output stored in Amazon S3. MediaPackage packages the content, formatting it in response to playback requests from downstream devices. By default, this solution creates packaging configurations for HLS, DASH, MSS, and CMAF.
Leverage the Video on Demand on AWS solution or the Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution as a reference implementation to automatically provision the AWS services necessary to build a scalable, distributed video-on-demand workflow.
Customization
The Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution can be easily customized and used as the starting point to create a more complex workflow. Alternatively, the Video on Demand on AWS solution leverages AWS Step Functions, which breaks the workflow into individual steps, making it easier to customize or extend the architecture for your specific video-on-demand needs.
Solving with AWS Solutions: Video on Demand on AWS
AWS Media Blog
Introducing the Video On Demand on AWS Foundation Solution
Customers told us that the existing Video on Demand on AWS solution has more features than required for some transcoding workflows. To solve this, we created a new solution called Video On Demand (VOD) on AWS Foundation that is now available in the AWS Solutions Library.
