Video Specs For Amazon S3

If it is to be viewed on browsers you probably want mp4 or .flv (flash video) with headers up front enabling them to stream, and some scaled down dimentions, 90% quality setting seems a bit high, you have no optimize for the web presets?

If it is for browser playback, start with a short 5 min test file to check whether if starts playing immediately or has to fully preload first. There's a free wordpress plugin that can play from a bucket with some degree of security.

Yes I have done it. It depends on what you are using the video for. Usually when hosting video on a site the script I use requests that the video be saved as flv so it can be played. There are no problems with audio.
First I usually save videos as wmv. Then convert this format to other formats depending on what I need the video for.

Why don't you try getting the first 10 minutes of the videos then trying different formats depending on what you need the video for then saving it then guestimate if 10 minutes produces a 30MB video for example then 120 minutes might be ?? MB.

Like I said the software I used dictates that the videos to be shown on my site are to be flv format so that takes the guess work out of it for me.

I guess I wouldn't have a video that was 1 hour and 20 minutes in length. It's far too long and is going to be such a large file no matter what format you convert it to. I would much prefer to break it up into smaller videos so that's it's also easier for my paying customers to handle.

Having said that, the best format to use for Amazon S3 is MP4 videos. They seem to give the best quality/size ratio. That is what I have always used and never had any problems. Without knowing exactly what is in your video you will need to play around with the settings yourself until you find one that works best for your video.

To quicken up the process I would chop about a minute out of the video and create a new file and just test your settings with that small sample of video - otherwise you will be there forever waiting for it to process everytime.

A video for the web that is rendered a 90% is huge overkill. Just for grins, click on one of the video links in my sig (nothing to buy there) and you'll see the videos are graphic heavy with a lot of movement and were renderd at 35%. (MP4)

Fwiw, the time it takes to render a video is more about the speed of your processor than it is about the length of the video. The length matters, but not as much as the amount of information that has to change frame by frame. That's where your processor's speed comes into play.

And I agree with WillR. I would break it up into smaller chunks. It takes an awefull lot of 'eye candy' to watch a 1:20 video without switching it off.

~Bill

Amazon only provides 1gb of data transfer on their free tier. that means if your video was say 200mb only 5 people a month could download it before you were forced to pay the wopping dime per gig bandwidth fees (joking).

As for file size... if I were disteibuting a video for download that was nothing more than talking head, screen capture or something similar I would NEVER encode it higher than 700kbps and prob closer to 500kbps TOTAL audio+video bit rates. 4000 is just plain unecessary.

If you are streaming it then my target bitrate would be 380kbps or less. 4000 kbps renders it unuwatchable to anyone on a T1, rural, o r slower broadband connection.

Also... you can host any file at any bit rate at any size... s3 has little to do with it. what you need to consider your clients and the speed of their internet connections and optimizing your file's bit rate for optimal streaming, fast loading, and compression to save on bandwidth...

But I must say that anyone whos product becomes popular enough to have to worry about bandwidth and how file size effects their bandwith bill...

...will likely have the small amount of cash it will cost to pay the measly little s3 bandwidth bill. The cost of delivering premium content is always negligable unless your are delivering gig files to thousands of buyers (a good problem to have).

Do a quick search for "handbrake" on google and download it. Then encode your video using h.264 mp4 codec to your desired optimized bit rate and be done with it.