Amazon is now offering bucket-to-bucket H.264 transcoding.

This is interesting, and might eventually harm a bunch of third-party vendors that offer this service already, but right now Amazon only outputs H.264+AAC in an MP4 container. $0.03 per minute of transcoded content is about an order of magnitude higher than I expected, since that’s about double the rate of a quadruple-extra-large, high-I/O EC2 instance, which is overkill if they’re using H.264 encode hardware. Perhaps a big part of the cost is that Amazon is covering the license fees for the codecs? Or is this charge significantly marked up for convenience?

I found it amusing that the first comment was something like “When will we get H.265 support?”

I wonder if they’re using ffmpeg under the hood? I read some pretty strong theories that YouTube was using a modified ffmpeg in its early days, but I’ll bet YouTube is using higher performance proprietary codec today. If someone uses this new Amazon service, I’d love to see a resulting file because the MP4 metadata idiosyncracies can probably point to a specific container encoder implementation.

Originally shared by Abraham Williams

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-transcoder.html

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