Stop Worrying About Video Formats: A Developer’s Guide to AWS MediaConvert
If you’ve ever built a feature that involves users uploading videos, you know the pain. One user uploads a 4GB .mov file from an iPhone, another uploads a .webm from a desktop, and your manager wants all of them to play smoothly on a 3G connection in a subway tunnel. You don't want to manage a fleet of FFMPEG servers. You just want the video to work. Enter AWS Elemental MediaConvert . In this guide, we’ll look at what MediaConvert is, how to use it to generate streaming-ready HLS (using .ts segments), and how to build a fully automated pipeline using Lambda and EventBridge to notify your API when the job is done. Part 1: What is MediaConvert? Think of MediaConvert as "FFMPEG as a Service," but with enterprise-grade scaling. It is a file-based video transcoding service. Input: You give it a raw video file in an S3 bucket. Processing: It converts (transcodes) that file into new formats (MP4, HLS, DASH, etc.). Output: It dumps the result into another S3 bucket. Unli...