How To Set-Up Video on Demand[VOD] Using AWS MediaConvert

In case when working with broadcasting videos for a web application or for broadcast cable, you will need to deliver the video in some standard format that provides a high quality and consistent experience to viewers or end-users. MediaConvert provides the mechanism for converting videos to formats accordingly.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert supports set of input formats and adaptive bitrate (ABR) packaging output formats for delivering high-quality content from a range of sources onto primary and multiscreen devices.

Find below following components of AWS MediaConvert :

1. Jobs : Job is nothing but does transcoding task. Every job convert input file to the intended output file.
2. Queues : Queues are used for parallel processing of jobs.
3. Presets : Presets are group of encoding settings for a single output.

Now we will see workflow for creating MediaConvert Job with taking input as .mp4 file from S3 bucket and creating an output in Apple HLS format with multiple presets.

Now we will see use-case where we will be setting up simple serverless video on demand (VOD) workflow so we can experiment with streaming video with AWS MediaConvert. In this setup we will first setup an Amazon S3 bucket with associated Lambda trigger that submits a transcoding job using Amazon Elemental MediaConvert when a new file is uploaded/ingested in S3 bucket. The transcoding job specifies video packaging settings like HLS and DASH format along with the bitrates that are intended from the transcoded output. This information is all stored in another Amazon S3 bucket. Finally, the videos are streamed securely by Amazon CloudFront, restricting access to the Amazon S3 bucket by using origin access identity (OAI).

Following is the architecture of above discussed scenario.



Thus with the above workflow we can proceed and setup an seamless VOD using AWS MediaConvert Service.