You need a way to seamlessly download the minimum number of bytes from the file in order to extract the technical metadata. The extraction of technical metadata from the asset on S3 becomes the tricky part in this workflow. In this post, I walk you through the process of setting up a workflow to extract technical metadata from multimedia files uploaded to S3 using Lambda. When customers work with media assets like video and audio files on Amazon S3, there is a typical workflow where assets get uploaded to S3, S3 triggers an event for that upload, and that event triggers an AWS Lambda function, which can extract technical metadata from the asset on S3. The technical metadata may also be stored for indexing and fast retrieval in a database service like Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon RDS. The asset may be transcoded to a standard “house” format, resized, or have a quality check performed to make sure it is in an acceptable format. With technical metadata, customers can make intelligent decisions about what to do next in their workflow.
For a video asset, technical metadata includes information such as video codec, audio codec, resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, and a host of other very detailed technical information.
