Lambda Thumbnail Generation

🚀 What is this?

This is the complete source code to accompany the article here.

⭐ What does it do?

It takes a video that was uploaded to an S3 bucket and generates n number of thumbnails from it.

💨 How do I use it?

Create a Lambda and use the files in the src/ folder. You need to read the article to see how it ties in the AWS infrastructure, but basically:

• Create an S3 bucket
• Create a trigger event to run a Lambda whenever an .mp4 file is uploaded to that bucket
• That event triggers the Lambda (created from this source code) which uses FFmpeg to generate n thumbnails
• Those thumbnails are then uploaded to another S3 bucket

🎲 Why would I use this over AWS Transcoder?

You wouldn't, necessarily. AWS Transcoder is good but very expensive compared to doing it yourself in Lambda. I have processed a few hundred short videos using the above source code / technique laid out in the article; the cost has been $0.00. AWS Transcoder costs around $0.45 per 60 minutes of video processed.

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Changelog:

13th February 2023:

AWS has begun defaulting Lambdas to v18 of Node. The code has been updated to use v18, which includes:

• Using ESM syntax rather than CJS (export default rather than module.exports)
• Using the .mjs extension rather than .js
• Assuming V3 of the AWS-SDK rather than V2