How to encode a video simultaneously for web, iPhone, iPad, iPod & other handheld devices using HandBrake

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

S3 Amazon and DreamHost: a perfect marriage

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

Converting video to streaming MP4 for S3 Amazon with AVS Video Converter

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

New categories created

Since I write quite a lot about S3 Amazon related issues, we decided to dedicate a special category for it so that you can find everything on this subject in one place. So far, we plugged most of it in Video Channels/Networks which is a bit awkward. Therefore, if you bookmarked some of the articles … Read more

S3 Cloudfront: How to setup a bucket for private streaming – revised

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

S3: Private Streaming MP3 audios on CloudFront is a problem. The solution is simple.

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

TimedText and how to use it

TimedText is a convention to place subtitles in videos without actually embed them in the video itself.  This has huge advantages over embedded (hardcoded) subtitles because you can use the same video while using different languages, depending where you show it.   TimedText can be used in two ways: Closed Captions or Open Captions. Closed … Read more

S3: News from the CloudFront! Private streaming video – revised

With CloudFront you can not only stream your own videos, you can make streaming videos private on top of that!  In other words, you can have paid videos on your site or membership area without the fear of copying the video. You can do the same thing with expiring URLs but private streaming has other … Read more

S3: Streaming video with CloudFront

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

S3 Amazon: Protect files against unauthorized use

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

S3 Amazon: How to embed video in your site

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

S3 Amazon: how to sign up and connect to the server -Revised

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

S3 Amazon and video: introduction

A reader asked what I thought of using S3 Amazon Web Services (AWS) for serving videos , so I did some research and found this interesting enough to share with the readers because the servers of Amazon have a couple of interesting possibilities. S3 Amazone is basically a storage space that can be used to … Read more

Best wishes for 2010 !

Dear readers, I wish you all the best for this new year with its magical name two thousand and ten!
I shall be honest with you: I’m happy 2009 is over.  It was a stormy year for most people, I think.  But this year I feel there is going to be a fresh wind and the doom and gloom of last year will disperse.  For the time being, let’s celebrate at least that we survived another year 🙂

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