Hosting Video on Amazon S3

Video hosting on Amazon S# is both fantastic and a headache for non-technical busy people.  It is a great service but you have to understand what the service is.  There is NO way to upload your video to Amazon S3 from any interface they provide.  Amazon is simply scalable storage and bandwidth for steaming them out.

So you either need someone that understands how to work with Amazon S3 or you need to take some time to figure out how to use the tools.

Info about how to  embed video hosted on the Amazon S3 Web Service.

First, why Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 offers storage of files at a very low cost and provides very scalable and reliable storage and backup at unbeatable prices.  Its the best 50 cents I spend each month.

How to Embed a Video stored on Amazon S3

Lots of websites are offering courses and membership areas to help you embed video into your blog or membership website which are stored on Amazon S3.  I did not want to pay and I am fairly technical and  I knew I could figure it out.   But I was pulling my hair out because I kept almost getting it to work, but not quit.

After a lot of testing and effort  I downloaded JW FLV Media Player, posted the files in the root directory of my website and used the site setup wizard to get the code just right.

Finally, I found that this works with FLV files which is one video format.  So now I am making all my videos in the FLV format.

The great thing is that with this code and wizard I can now embed video into my private membership sites that are hosted on Amazon S3.

Eventually I hit another problem.  The embed code did not work well in WordPress.   I found that WordPress has disabled the embed tag because of security issues.  Luckily, I found the Wordoress Plugin pb-embedFlash – The documentation was not great because it lacked the basic examples in a clear way.  However, I experimented with it a bit and found I could simply type [flash url] and it would replace the tag with the flash player and play the FLV file.  Like most things in WordPress, once you get used to it, it works very well.

If you are looking for the best video hosting solution that will allow you to embed video into your blogs and websites, I assure you the above solution using Amazon S3 and the Free Video Player are great options.  Remember that if you are using the video player to make money, you need to buy a license.

Hosting Video on Amazon S3 is the professional option – just be ready to put some time into figuring out the details.