Problem: I had over 500 Gig and 5000 .mp4 videos on S3 with cloudfront that weren't loading quickly!
Option 1 (bad idea) : Download, Transcode, Upload the video (would take about 2 months uploading)
Solution: AWS Server – Created some custom scripts on Linux instance to change the headers of the video files.
This is the quickest method as it’s on Amazon network, we setup the server in same region as S3. We also setup multiple servers to run at same time in parallel.
Other notes:
MP4 files transcoded with software from any-video-convert.com are not starting quickly in your embedded media player
MP4 media files have a data block in them called a "moov atom" which contains metadata information about the media contained therein. In order to support the fast start option, this "moov atom" needs to exist and be placed at the beginning of the data file. Different transcoders are used to create the MP4 files, but based on tests Zencoder correctly is creating the "moov atom" at the beginning and enabling the fast start, whereas the software from any-video-convert.com may not be.
A good article which explains all of this here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/mp4_movie_atom.html
in the adobe.com article mentioned above, there are a number of media editing tools listed near the bottom of the article. You could certainly use those tools to examine the properties of your media files as they exist now to check for the correctness of the files' data, and their ability to support fast start options.
AWS Elastic Transcoder Service although not tested does do this also, so all files transcoded to MP4 output will have the "moov atom" placed at the beginning of the transcoded media file
MP4 FastStart.exe – Works on PC but would need to download / upload
Cloudberry Drive – Maps S3 Drive
If you need help (and are willing to pay a fair price for it): peter at digitalfishing . com
