In 5 minutes how to video blog with Amazon S3
In this post we’ll show you how to get your first video off your camera onto your wordpress blog, amazon s3 or cloudfront in less than5 minutes, with free tools.
I’ve been using Amazon Services for quite some time, and haven’t ever needed services like EzS3 as most features can be done pretty easily for free. The video players also are typically available for free and pretty easy to configure.
- Get a wordpress compatible blog (comes with most providers) free.
- Get the pb-embedFlash wordpress plugin which allows you to quickly embed any flash or flash video with a single line, in a standards compliant way.
- Sign up for Amazon s3 with Amazon Web Services (free signup, reasonable costs for hosting)
Click to signup for Amazon S3
- Use S3Fox that can be installed into FireFox (free) to upload the files to your bucket. S3Fox is like a FTP for your webserver that works with S3 instead.
-
IMPORTANT Click the Everyone has Read access, else they won't be able to see the video
Once uploaded, set the permissions to these as public so that they can be visible to the open net, by default Amazon makes them only available to you.
- Decide on S3 or CloudFront for delivery of the file. I recommend CloudFront for more consistent access across the world.
-
Copy the URL and Paste it into your embed code.
Right click to Copy the url.
- Paste that url into the embed code of your wordpress post (see the top video for an explanation)
- Preview and that’s it!
You may also be interested in this post, comparision of Amazon vs Ooyala etc.
NOTE: if this is your first video, and you play the video from a media player somewhere else, you’ll need to upload a crossdomain.xml file, you’ll only have to do that one time per ‘bucket’ (where you can have more than one bucket per your amazon account, for different companies). The one I use is here (but becareful, this is “wide open” access).
Be sure to opt-in to the right to gain access to more great tips.
The video that we used in the example, starring Mr. Pine. Enjoy!
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Every Amazon S3 related blog gives you an impression that there is only one Amazon S3 client available – S3 fox. However there are many more freeware clients which are much superior. For instance, S3HUB for Mac (http://s3hub.com) and CloudBerry Explorer for Windows (http://s3explorer.cloudberrylab.com/) .
Hey Andy,
Thanks SO much for the pointers, actually I know there are other clients out there (most are NOT free and I don’t want to link to them), the post was focused on getting a video up, not a tour of all the ways possible (as the solutions you mention are platform dependent I couldn’t have covered both in 5 minutes in the video).
But I’m not on a Mac so wouldn’t have found S3hub, good to know as I may buy one soon!
As to why S3Fox is so prevalent, I believe it’s all Amazon’s fault, the videos introducing me to CloudFront mentioned S3Fox and it works well enough, I haven’t looked hard for anything free since.
CloudBerry seems to have some very powerful features (e.g. scheduling ACL’s, retry, remembering upload). I’ll definitely give it a try!
I’ve just, today, signed up for Amazon S3, and I’m reading stuff like this blog post to find ways to make it all work.
I’ve grabbed S3Fox, as I use both Windows and Linux computers, and of course, this firefox plug-in will work on all of them!
Your off to a great day then, I hope you can get it all working quickly!
Troy,
Another developer directed me to your site. I will be using Amazon S3 very soon. Please help me understand something. I am looking for a “simple” way to place a video on my WordPress sites whereby the first frame of the video is automatically displayed (just like we all see in IM sites and emails). I don’t want the user to have to click on “play” to see this first frame and I don’t want the video to auto-play at first.
So can flowplayer handle this having to use a starting jpg? Can you please explain to me how?
By the way, I just now signed up for your “Insider Club” and see that you have a lot of cool info here. Glad I found you!
– Thanks, Roger
Hey Roger,
Welcome aboard.
What you are after I and some others call a splash image, flow player DOES support it, you just need a jpg/png. Here’s the post on how to set one up.
http://www.troynotes.com/818/how-to-get-a-splash-image-before-your-video-plus-other-tips/