• Easy to integrate with any backend or CMS
• All-AWS setup
• Automatic transcoding to Adaptive Bitrate, triggered by video uploads to S3
• Notifies when a video is ready to be played (transcoding complete)
• CMAF support
• Original videos get archived to Glacier
• CDN delivery
• Fully scalable

Built as streaming backbone for a video sharing platform with loads of user contributed content (i.e. video uploads)

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console, then click the button below to launch the CloudFormation template. Alternatively you can download the template and adjust it to your needs.

2. Be sure to fill in your email address under NotificationEmail. This will be used for testing transcoding notifications.
3. Check the I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources box. This confirms you agree to have some required IAM roles and policies created by CloudFormation.
4. Hit the Create button.
5. Wait for the Status to become CREATE_COMPLETE. Note that this may take 10 minutes or more.
6. Under Outputs, notice the key named CloudFrontDistributionDNSName; it should have a corresponding value like xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net; write this down for using later

Notes:

• The template is launched in the US East (N. Virginia) Region by default. To launch this solution in a different AWS Region, use the region selector in the console navigation bar.
• The solution uses AWS Elemental MediaConvert which is available in specific AWS Regions only. Therefore, you must deploy it in a region that supports the service.

1. You will be sent 2 emails asking for Subscription Confirmation to their respective SNS topics. Click the included confirmation link for both.

2. CloudWatch will have created 3 new buckets in your S3. Note the one that has -sourcebucket- in its name and upload a video file to it.

3. Wait to receive a notification to your email. This may take a while, depending on the length of the video you just uploaded. If the subject contains EncodeFailed, there has been an error transcoding your video; the body of the email may provide details about what went wrong. If the subject contains EncodeComplete then your file is processed and ready for playback.

4. Note the paths to your processed video files in the email body under playlistFilePaths; the section will look like the following:

    "playlistFilePaths":["s3://xxxxxx-destinationbucket-yyyyyyyyyyyy/{filename}.mpd","s3://xxxxxx-destinationbucket-yyyyyyyyyyyy/{filename}.m3u8"]
   

...and these are the S3 URLs of the HLS and MPEG-DASH manifests of the video 5. Compose your CDN video URLs by replacing the S3 prefix in URLs above with https://{CloudFrontDistributionDNSName} (DNS name retrieved in step 6 above); they should look as following:

HLS URL:

	https://xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/{filename}.m3u8

MPEG-DASH URL:

	https://xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/{filename}.mpd

6. Test your video URL in your favorite player or player tester. You may use this tester for HLS and this one for DASH.

Of course, video uploads should not be manual and transcode notifications should not go to your inbox.

At the minimum, you'll need the following done to automate the process:

• Create a mechanism that generates and distributes presigned URLs for your users to upload videos directly to S3
• Adjust the SNS topics to notify your API/backend (rather than your email) when video items are ready for viewing