Video tutorials and articles on podcasting, videocasting, video channels and content management
All tutorials related to S3 Amazon and cloudFront with emphasis on video and audio
RTMP streaming is obsolete as of end December 2020 but we keep it posted as a piece of history. In this tutorial we embed RTMP streaming with HLS adaptive streaming fall-back using JW Player 7.9.3 This tutorial is a follow-up of RTMP with HLS adaptive streaming fall-back on AWS – Part 1 which explains the preparations to … Read more
RTMP streaming is obsolete as of end December 2020 but we keep it posted as a piece of history. HLS adaptive streaming doesn’t work on IExplorer 11 in HTML5 mode as I discovered while testing my art site. But there is luckily a solution, namely RTMP with HLS adaptive streaming fall-back. That sounds a little … Read more
In this tutorial, we are going to embed an HLS adaptive streaming video on a website. This tutorial is the follow up of the HLS adaptive streaming tutorial with CloudFront & JW Player, where we showed how to prepare and process videos for HLS streaming. We presume you followed that tutorial and have already processed the video segments … Read more
A step-by-step HLS adaptive streaming tutorial with CloudFront & JW Player in two parts. It is easier than you think. This tutorial presumes you have already an Amazon Web Services account (AWS) and a premium license of JW Player 6 or 7. The advantage of HLS adaptive streaming is that you can serve videos according to … Read more
HLS streaming (HTTP Live Streaming) has a couple of advantages over RTMP streaming in a sense that it can circumvent corporate firewalls and proxies and it plays on most mobile devices and desktops. RTMP streaming does not work on mobiles at all since it needs Flash, although JW Player has a HTML5 fallback method for mobiles. … Read more
I get a lot of questions about what an expiring link on Amazon Web Services (AWS) actually does and how to use it properly, therefore I thought it useful to explain it in this article. What is an expiring link? An expiring link, also called signed URL, is a link to a file or object that is limited … Read more
Tutorial on how to setup a private web distribution on AWS. There are quite a few changes on the AWS console in a good sense. It is much easier now to set up. Since this has an impact on everyone using web distributions via CloudFront, you may want to have a look at this tutorial, … Read more
Elastic transcoder converts videos on your Amazon Web Services account. In this video tutorial, we show you how it works. Some video editors and screen capture software do not produce the correct format for streaming video via AWS. There are many good video converters around, like HandBrake, Squeeze, etc., but the Elastic Transcoder is a … Read more
Most site owners use their main access and secret keys from AWS (S3 Amazon/CloudFront) to publish videos and audios. Although this works very well, it is not that safe because if someone else gets hold of your keys, they have full access to your S3 Buckets/CloudFront distributions. To prevent this from happening, AWS introduced IAM … Read more
If you want to offer videos or audios for download, or actually any file type on your WordPress site, but you do not want the links to be leeched on other sites, you might be interested in this free WordPress plugin; S3Media LinkSafe Lite 1.0. It creates expiring links to files on your S3 bucket … Read more
Elastic Transcoder is an online service of AWS Amazon. It converts videos online and you can chose from a range of presets to determine the format of the output. It is possible to set several formats in one go and have them transcoded/converted in the background. You can also create new presets based on existing … Read more
Finally, after a lot of nagging by various interested parties(me included), Australia gets its own Edge server on S3 Amazon, namely in Sydney. This will have quite some impact on delivery of streaming video and audio in the Land Down Under, because they have serious problems playing HD video. An edge server is especially useful … Read more
Billing Alert from S3 Amazon is a fantastic new feature. It gives you the opportunity to be warned by email when your bill reaches an amount you determine upfront. This will help you greatly to control your spending on AWS, since you can take immediate action when necessary. Sometimes, your audios or videos score a hit … Read more
Embedding a video/audio playlist is not difficult at all, it only requires your full attention. In this tutorial (part 2), I’ll show you how to embed a dynamic playlist. A dynamic playlists differs with a regular playlist in a sense that you do not need to create a separate xml file. For this tutorial, you … Read more
All S3 Amazon account holders should be aware that there are hacker scripts around that scan for public content in S3 buckets. Amazon has warned all account holders if they have public buckets. Reading public content is quite easy since public files are readable to everyone. But what does that actually imply and what can … Read more
Update 30 July 2022 You want to ensure that everyone, or at least most people can watch your video? Then you have to create a video that works on the web and mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and other handheld devices. This is not evident and you may count on it that … Read more
By placing all heavy files on S3 Amazon/CloudFront, you only need a lightweight solution like DreamHost for your site itself. That way you have the best of both worlds. Both services are very cheap and easy to deal with. In the past, I had my doubts regarding DreamHost (affialate link) and indeed, playing video or … Read more
Some video converters do not get it right when converting video to MP4 to stream on S3 Amazon/CloudFront. Especially the cheaper converters like AVS Video Converter for Windows tend to have problems. Luckily, there is a trick to fix this problem. Here you find a video tutorial on how to get the correct settings from … Read more
It is a while ago since I did a test with an HD video on S3 Amazon, so I thought this might be a good moment to go for it again. As we all know, HD video on video services like YouTube, Vimeo and others play reasonably well, although they inevitably stutter at some point. … Read more
The information on this page is no longer relevant since RTMP streaming requires Flash, which ahs been condemned to death by the developer community. We leave this article in for history sake. To avoid problems with streaming video and audio, in particular private streaming, the way to go is to start with a fresh S3 … Read more
Private streaming MP3 is problematic on S3 Cloudfront. It often does not play and you get no error message telling you what the problem is. The fastest and best way to deal with this is to convert your audio to M4a, the format used for iTunes. I know, you are not looking forward to this … Read more
With CloudFront, you can stream your own audio and video without using any code or installing complicated server software. CloudFront is an Amazon service which works in conjunction with your S3 Amazon account (S3 AWS). What the service basically did so far was to serve content from your S3 account to the closest server in … Read more
Here you see how you can create expiring URLs to protect your files from leeching and this time we work with CloudBerry Explorer Pro, the competitor of S3 Browser. The Pro version does not differ much from the free version when it comes to creating expiring URLs, although there are a couple of features which … Read more
You want to embed video or audio from S3 Amazon into your site? This article tells you how to deal with the code involved to get your videos and audios up and running. You can use this code in practically any cms or regular website. Now, for content management systems like Joomla, WordPress or Drupal, … Read more
In this article I explain how S3 Amazon works related to video and audio. As I already wrote in my previous article, S3 is primarily a storage facility with little software on board. Luckily, there is some good third party software around that extends the service in a quite spectacular way. But let me first … Read more