Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a service that enables the conversion of digital media stored in Amazon S3 into the formats required for user playback devices.
Elastic Transcoder has three components:
Pipeline are queues that manage format conversion jobs. Elastic Transcoder processes jobs in the order they are added to a pipeline. Typically, you need to create at least two pipelines: one for standard priority jobs and one for high priority jobs. Most jobs will be submitted to the standard priority pipeline, only using the high priority pipeline when immediate format conversion is needed.
Job specifies settings not included in the preset, such as the file to be converted and whether to create thumbnails. Each job converts a file into a different format. When creating a job, Elastic Transcoder will add it to the specified pipeline. If there are other jobs already in the pipeline, the new job will have to wait and start processing when resources become available.
Preset are templates that define most of the settings for the converted file. Elastic Transcoder includes several default presets for common formats. Users can create their own presets. When creating a job, you need to specify which preset will be used.