Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.7.2 and later.
Amazon CloudFront’s new streaming feature allows you to stream your content directly from Amazon s3 bucket. New version of CloudBerry Explorer helps to configure a streaming distribution and generate URLs for streaming content as well as HTML code for your video player.
How to configure Streaming Distribution
Configuration is easy and straightforward. First, select a bucket, right click it and select Streaming option in the context menu.
Click Enable Streaming Distribution checkbox and click ok. This is the only necessary step. You can also optionally enter CNAMEs and Comment. Check out our blog post for more info on how to configure CNAMEs.
By this time you have configured your distribution for streaming. Note that the bucket configured as a streaming distribution shows up with a new icon
How to generate streaming URLs
Select the file you want to generate a streaming URL for and click Web URL button on the toolbar. Web URL dialog will recognize that you are creating a URL for streaming distribution and enable corresponding options. One thing you should be able to do is to create RTMP URLs to embed them in the video player HTML code. Just select RTMP URL type and you are ready to copy the URL.
How to generate an HTML code for the player
Those familiar with streaming and players may want to skip this section but we would like to show how easy it is to embed the player on your website or blog and start streaming directly from CloudFront distributions.
There are a number of free players on the market and here we are going to demonstrate how to use JW Player (non-commercial version comes with a watermark, if you don’t like it you can buy it)
Anyways, if you choose an HTML option as shown on the screen the result will come in the form of HTML code for JW Player . You can copy and paste this code onto your blog or the website.
Note: You will have to download a Flash client, such as the JW Player and store the client in a web-accessible location. If storing in your Amazon S3 bucket, you can either serve it out of a CloudFront HTTP distribution or serve it directly from Amazon S3. You can't, however, use your same streaming distribution to serve both the client and the video. You'll need also to create a crossdomain.xml file to allow the client and video to come from separate domains.
Here's an example of the most permissive cross-domain XML:
You can download the sample crossdomain.xml file here (right click and click Save As)
Further information
You can update the code for your player using update HTML template link. Let’s say you want to use something other than JW Player and you can modify the template for your favorite player.
Besides, there is an easy to use code generation wizard on the Longtail Video website. We recommend that you use the wizard to generate your html code if you need more advanced options like player style and size. Full discussion of all the options is well outside of the scope of this article. Just make sure you select flvplayer with an rtmp stream
There is another freeware player that we want to mention for completeness: Flowplayer also comes in several editions and you can use the free one. Note that we currently don’t support generating the HTML code for the Flowplayer.
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CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/
CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO is a Windows program that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/ It is currently in beta and free for all users. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/
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4 comments:
I've signed up to S3, however the streaminig option is grayed out once I've uploaded files am I missing something?
Hi: I was trying to follow your instructions about setting CloudFront, Amazon S3, CloudBerry S3 Explorer and JW Player in order to embed streaming videos on my blog, but is not working for me.
What I did was the following:
I am using cloudberry to upload my videos to S3. I created a bucket and saved my video there and created an streaming distribution with cloudfront for that bucket. I created another bucket and upload the player.swf to S3 and created distribution download for that bucket with cloudfront. The generated html code to embed the JW player that I get from cloudberry is not working for me. Every time I try to embed the code I get an error message in my blog saying the "embed tag is not closed". (I am using blogger)
I managed to get the embed code directly from the jw player website using the setup wizard and I could embed the code without errors, but I can't see any player on the post, just a white space.
I don't know if I am doing something wrong... probably, I am new to this. Please, can you elaborate more about how to store the player.swf on Amazon S3 and why the generated code by cloudberry is not working? Also, I don't understand very well what to do with that crossdomain.xml file.
Thank you.
This is an example of the includes/config.php file for embedding video with flowplayer.
"http://distribution.cloudfront.net", //if you host your videos on Amazon S3 change to the URL of your bucket.
"splashimageLocator" => "http://distribution.cloudfront.net", //if you host your images on Amazon S3 change to the URL of your bucket.
"xCloseImage" => "http://www.yourdomain.com/aws/player/", //change this if you host the close.png file (in 'player' folder)
"javascriptPlayerLocator" => "http://www.yourdomain.com/aws/player/flowplayer-3.1.4.min.js", //host on your server
"SWFplayerLocator" => "http://www.yourdomain.com/aws/player/flowplayer-3.1.5.swf", //host on your server
"ContentPlugin" => "http://www.yourdomain.com/aws/player/ContentPlugin.swf", //your server
"addafflinks" => "http://www.yourdomain.com/aws/addafflinks/", //ignore
"PlayerControls" => "controls: null", //ignore
); //Just leave this one alone.
?>
Can you switch distribution settings for your bucket (eg. from download to streaming and vice versa without affecting the bucket)?
Will I lose any uploads I have already made if I switch the setting?
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