Video and Audio Player Plugins for Streaming Amazon S3 Content

This post highlights some plugins (mostly premium) currently available for streaming audio and video content stored on Amazon S3 servers. Amazon S3 provides robust and economic cloud storage for audio and video files–streaming processes are, however, still evolving.

Current operating systems and browsers make use of two technologies to render video streaming, Flash and HTML5, and players typically must render in both modes to make content available on all systems. Flash has been a standard for many years, but, for example, iDevices do not support flash, and therefore require HTML5 rendering; however, HTML5 support for audio has not been good. Having said that ….

Audio and Video Content

JWPlayer is the player best supported by Amazon S3, via their Cloudfront platform; Cloudfront streaming combined with the JWPlayer for Flash and HTML5 Video WordPress plugin provides probably the most robust and reliable method for streaming both video and audio files from Amazon S3 storage (see the JWPlayer WordPress plugin documentation) (for Cloudfront directions, see the W3Total Cache post here).

The JWPlayer plugin is free for streaming on-site audio and video (non-commercial), but JWPlayer Premium is required for S3 streaming, at a current cost of $149 per site per year, or $299 per 10 sites per year.

The premium S3 Bubble, S3 Media Maestro, and EZS3 plugins also stream S3 audio and video content. These plugins provide simpler and less expensive solutions to streaming, although with less Amazon S3 support (and hence less long-term stability.

The cost of S3 Bubble is currently about $8 per month ($96 per year), the cost of S3 Media Maestro is currently $47 for a 2-site license (1 year free upgrades) (or $up to $99 for a 25-site license), and the base cost of EZS3 is $20 per month for a single-user license. You may wish to check options to create playlists (this option is not available for example in S3 Media Maestro).

My Choice? I currently use S3 Media Maestro.

Video Content Only

The HTML5 Flowplayer plugin is well supported, for example by the Bucket Explorer interface (see the post on S3, Glacier, and Cloudfront interfaces), and Flowplayer Premium offers reasonable pay-as-you-go rates.

Other video and streaming options include HDW Player Plugin (also with premium options), vooPlayer, S3 Video, and Secure HTML5 Video Player. I am less familiar with the stability and functionality of these plugins – perhaps a reader can add comments below.

The streaming of audio-visual content from S3 storage is evolving rapidly. Please update this post with your comments, either with new plugins or comments about the plugins mentioned above. Thank you!

Related Topics – S3 and Cloudfront User Interfaces

Access Key Management

For uploads and streaming, set up an S3 IAM user with limited access credentials. The following access credentials should be sufficient (consider removing the PutObject and DeleteObject actions when setting up streaming credentials):

{
 "Statement": [
 {
 "Effect": "Allow",
 "Action": ["s3:GetBucketLocation", "s3:ListAllMyBuckets"],
 "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
 },
 {
 "Effect": "Allow",
 "Action": ["s3:ListBucket" ],
 "Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::mybucket"]
 },
 {
 "Effect": "Allow",
 "Action": [ "s3:PutObject", "s3:GetObject", "s3:DeleteObject"],
 "Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::mybucket/*"]
 }
 ]
}

See other posts with Amazon S3-related content.