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Video transcoding with AWS Elemental MediaConvert

How to set up AWS Elemental MediaConvert

Introduction

https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/ is a service provided by Amazon Web Services. Use of this service can result in additional costs that are invoiced directly by Amazon Web Services. Censhare cannot influence or control these costs and therefore cannot be held responsible for them. Digital rights management (DRM) is not supported for AWS Elemental MediaConvert.

For a full list of supported formats, please refer to the third-party documentation.

Steps

In AWS

What to note on each step

  1. Create an AWS account

  2. Create an S3 storage

  3. Create an IAM role for reading and writing S3 buckets (to be used in the Media Convert jobs)

  4. Configure output settings (=video presets)

  5. Create a MediaConvert job and assign the IAM role to it

  1. -

  2. Exact bucket name and region

  3. Exact IAM role

  4. Exact preset names and which one should be a default

  5. Job id(s) for each kind of task

In addition to that, you will need both secret and access keys.

In Censhare Admin Client 

Configure Video Service for AWS MediaConvert

Have your notes from the previous steps ready.

  1. Log into the censhare Admin Client.

  2. Select Configuration → Services → Video: AWS MediaConvert and double-click Configuration.

  3. Fill out the General setup section und select Service enabled

  4. Fill out the Special setup section based on the settings from AWS

Example:

Screenshot 2025-06-17 at 16.53.42.png

Configure the AWS MediaConvert module

Have the notes from the previous steps ready.

The following configuration will use AWS MediaConvert for any kind of tasks, including video preview, still images, etc.

  1. Log into the censhare Admin Client.

  2. Select Configuration → Modules → Video: AWS MediaConvert and double-click Video conversion (automatic).

  3. Under General setup, select Enabled.

  4. Under Trigger events-> Asset events, select at least Create asset, Rebuild video preview, Rebuild preview, Save and Close.

    1. Optionally, select any other events that should trigger the transcoding.

      Screenshot 2025-06-18 at 11.39.30.png

  5. Under Asset filters → Search, add the following condition to the filter: 
    (Currversion = "0") and (Deletion state = "Not deleted") and (State = "Available") and (Type = "video")

    Screenshot 2025-06-18 at 11.39.41.png

  6. Optionally, add other trigger events.

  7. Under Special setup, enter the Presets ID from the AWS Elemental MediaConvert application and select the output file type.

  8. Confirm your edits with OK. A custom configuration is created under "Configuration/Module/AWS MediaConvert" below the default configuration.

  9. To activate your edits, click Update server configuration on the toolbar of the censhare Admin Client.

Using multiple configurations

If you want to use another transcoder in parallel (e.g., for still images), this can be achieved by using a stricter asset filter (e.g., by adding a domain to it) and/or by combining this filter with only specific events. You will need to create separate configurations for each use case.

The same can be done if you want to use one transcoder for different use cases as you can only apply one filter per configuration.

Troubleshooting

The media files are uploaded to the AWS bucket and then transcoded. In the AWS console, you can search for submitted jobs and find out if the jobs have been processed successfully. The converted files are stored as storage items on the video assets and can be also used for other purposes.