On November 13, 2025, AWS will discontinue support for HAQM Elastic Transcoder. After November 13, 2025, you will no longer be able to access the HAQM Elastic Transcoder console or HAQM Elastic Transcoder resources. For more information, see the migration blog post.
AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a new file-based video transcoding service that provides a comprehensive suite of advanced transcoding features, with on-demand rates starting at $0.0075/minute. Read more.
Already using HAQM Elastic Transcoder? It's simple to migrate to MediaConvert using this guide which includes step-by-step instructions and a script to convert your presets.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder is media transcoding in the cloud. It is designed to be a highly scalable, easy to use and a cost effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Adds Support For Clip Stitching
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Available In The Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Now Publishes Operational Metrics to HAQM CloudWatch
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Available In The Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Adds Support For WAV
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Now Supports MPEG-DASH
- HAQM Elastic Transcoder Adds Support for VP9
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HAQM Elastic Transcoder's Free Tier includes up to 20 minutes of transcoding each month.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder manages all aspects of the media transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding “job” specifying the location of your source media file and how you want it transcoded. HAQM Elastic Transcoder also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices. All these features are available via service API, AWS SDKs and the AWS Management Console.
Like other HAQM Web Services products, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using HAQM Elastic Transcoder — you simply pay based on the minutes you need to transcode, and resolution of the content transcoded.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder is designed to be easy to use. You can get started by using the AWS Management Console, the service API or the SDKs. System transcoding presets make it easy to get transcoding settings right the first time. We provide pre-defined presets to create media files that will play on a wide range of devices (like smartphones or tablets), as well as presets to create media files that are optimized for playback on a specific device (like the HAQM Kindle Fire HD or Apple iPod touch). You can also create segmented files and playlists for delivery using the HLS, Smooth, or MPEG-DASH protocol to compatible devices. Developers building applications that need transcoding can use the AWS SDKs for Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby, and the new AWS Command Line Interface.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder is designed to scale seamlessly with your media transcoding workload. HAQM Elastic Transcoder is architected to handle large volumes of media files and large file sizes. Transcoding pipelines enable you to perform multiple transcodes in parallel. HAQM Elastic Transcoder leverages other HAQM Web Services like HAQM S3, HAQM EC2, HAQM DynamoDB, HAQM Simple Workflow (SWF) and HAQM Simple Notification Service (SNS) to give scalability and reliability.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder uses a content duration-based pricing model: you pay based on the length of the output, in minutes, of the media you are transcoding. For example, if your video's transcoded output is 30 minutes in duration, you will pay for 30 minutes of transcoding. Similarly, if you create a 20 minute video clip from a 30 minute input file, you will pay for 20 minutes of transcoding. Alternately, if you are stitching together two 5 minute input files to create a single 10 minute output file, you will pay for 10 minutes of transcoding. With HAQM Elastic Transcoder, there are no minimum transcoding volumes, monthly commitments, or long term contracts.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder enables you to focus on your content rather than on managing transcoding software in a distributed cloud-based environment. The service takes care of scaling and operating the system, and manages the process of keeping codecs up to date. Combined with our service API and SDKs, this makes it easy for you to build media solutions that use HAQM Elastic Transcoder.
Your content is under your control: your assets are in your own HAQM S3 buckets, which you give us access to through IAM roles. This makes it simple to fit seamlessly into your current security and identity framework without giving up control. In building HAQM Elastic Transcoder, we made use of security best practices gained by building other HAQM Web Services. For more information about security on AWS, please refer to the AWS Security Center. For more information on compliance, including MPAA best practices, please refer to AWS Compliance.
Using HAQM Elastic Transcoder, HAQM S3 and HAQM CloudFront, you can store, transcode and deliver your content. By setting the S3 permissions for your CloudFront distribution in HAQM Elastic Transcoder, it is now a simple one step process to transcode content with HAQM Elastic Transcoder and deliver the multiple output videos via progressive download or adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS, Smooth, or MPEG-DASH) with CloudFront.
HAQM Elastic Transcoder provides an important media building block for creating end-to-end media solutions on AWS. For example, you can use HAQM Glacier to store master content, HAQM Elastic Transcoder to transcode masters to renditions for distribution stored in HAQM S3, stream these renditions at scale over the Internet using HAQM CloudFront, and monitor the health of your transcoding workflow using CloudWatch.