Posts Tagged ‘Online Video’

AWS CloudFront Now Does True-Streaming

Friday, December 18th, 2009 by Francois

AWS_LOGO_RGB_300pxAmazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that CloudFront now supports Flash streaming (RTMP) in addition to progressive downloads (HTTP). Live streaming is also expected to be rolled out at some point in 2010.

This is all being made possible by Amazon’s decision to deploy Flash Media Servers (FMS) at its 14 edge locations. The decision to go with FMS over Wowza Media Server is somewhat surprising given the fact we’ve been streaming off AWS for quite some time using Wowza Media Server for EC2 .

Even though we were really happy with the quality of service we eventually got out of this, setting it up was not a pleasant experience.

Given what I’ve just said why did we go down this route when there are plenty of content delivery networks (CDN’s) we could have used for this?

Bottom line, pricing and flexibility.

Put simply, using a CDN for true streaming (RTMP) more often that not is out of reach for low-volume publishers due to cost, long-term contracts and minimum commitments.

Hence, our decision to stream off of AWS using Wowza.

Now that CloudFront has deployed FMS we will certainly be reassessing our current set-up.

Using Amazon CloudFront for true-streaming offers low-volume publishers like us the following benefits:

  • high performance
  • reliable delivery
  • global coverage
  • ability to leverage other streaming protocols such as RTMPT, RTMPE, RTMPTE
  • no up-front commitments
  • no additional platform or licensing fees
  • no long-term contracts

We will definitely be testing CloudFront for streaming and will report back on our findings in the New Year.

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Categories: Cloud Computing, Hosting, Online Video
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Review: Ankoder

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 by Francois

Ankoder logo
Way back in 2008 we were battling away with a custom install of FFmpeg on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We are really perdantic about video encoding so we had a long list of requirements.

Mid-way through the process of tweaking this set-up a number of software-as-a-service solutions specialising in video transcoding popped up.

Ankoder, built by the guys from RoRCraft was one of these.

When we first tried Ankoder it was working … but it was a little raw.

Sometimes it wouldn’t do what you wanted. This was mostly due to the fact that the videos we were uploading were in a format that Ankoder didn’t support yet.

The other issue was Ankoder’s backend, it was a little buggy and lacked some of the features we needed.

So we held off of using it back then because competitors such as Encoding.com and later HDCloud seemed to offer a more stable solution.

That said, Ankoder was still very new and the excellent support from the founder of RORCraft, Rex, meant this was a transcoding option we definitely needed to monitor.

So we checked back in on Ankoder recently and were shocked to see how much it had evolved.

All of the “missing” features we had been looking for were there and more importantly they all worked well.

We did not have any of the issues we had before and the general usability of the back-end was great.

Following these enhancements we are really happy with Ankoder and will certainly be using them in the future.

Ankoder works through REST API which allows you to integrate it easily. There are some wrappers already written for different languages so chances are that half the work of integrating Ankoder is already done.

What’s more the pricing is transparent and fair.

Bottom line, all of the encoding solutions that run on AWS do a job, and do it well.

The way to determine the right provider for you is down to pricing and ease of integration.

We are really happy with Ankoder on both of these points and the great support/accessibility of the founder and CEO means we feel comfortable recommending this as a solution you should definitely look into too.

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Categories: Cloud Computing, Online Video, Reviews
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Using Amazon Web Services To Deliver Online Video

Saturday, April 25th, 2009 by Francois

AWS_LOGO_RGB_300pxAfter much research and testing we have settled on two approaches for delivering video content from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Each approach uses a different delivery protocol.

By progressive download (HTTP) using CloudFront or S3

HTTP delivery sends the entire video file upon request meaning the video arrives with the same quality at which it was encoded. However, the user will receive it only as fast as their network connection will allow.

You can get around this to a certain extent with PHP-streaming or pseudo-streaming but this still relies on a traditional web server rather than a streaming server.

By steaming (RTMP) using Wowza Media Server for EC2

When a file is streamed via a media server such as Wowza Media Server a measured stream of data is delivered to users as the video plays. Priority is given to timely delivery over aesthetic quality ensuring that the data stream continues uninterrupted, even if it means reducing quality.

Excellent or poor performance can be achieved with either delivery protocol. And in most cases, the user cannot tell whether the video they’re watching is downloading or streaming.

Why set up both on AWS?

HTTP:

  • is what S3 and CloudFront are all about
  • is suitable for videos of a short duration
  • is suitable for delivering high-bit rate encodings
  • is suitable if end-users need/are allowed to keep a copy of the video on their own computers

RTMP:

  • we had the in-house technical resources to configure and set this up
  • we needed a suitable delivery protocol for longer form content
  • we wanted to enable interactive functionaliy between the playback client and media server
  • we wanted greater statistical granularity
  • we wanted greater control over access rights to videos

We would never stick out our neck out and say that one delivery protocol was better than the other.

But we will say that they each have their own pro’s and con’s and having the option to choose between the two was critical for us.

There is no doubt that HTTP is a doddle to set-up.

Wowza for EC2 is amazingly well supported via the Wowza forums but it is still a bit of a challenge.

So our advice would be if your looking for the best of both worlds definitely look into the approaches outlined above but if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to offload your video delivery (or any other heavy assets) stick to S3/CloudFront you won’t be disappointed.

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Categories: Cloud Computing, Hosting, Online Video, Reviews, Tips
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