I am pleased to announce 1.3 release of FLV Mate

Apart from many bug fixes here are the major improvements:

• Progress bar is now showing a percentage of task completed
• Improved Amazon S3 file upload functionality
• Beta support for adding your own logo to the player
• And more…

Grab a free 30 days trial here.

If you have any questions, please join our support forum.

I’m please to announce a release of FLV Mate Wizard 1.1.

This release includes various bug fixes and the following improvements.

• Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard support
• FLV Mate Wizard can now create buckets in US West
• Added support for hiding video player controls
• Added support for video autoplay
• Video player is now even more lightweight (file size 21K)

Grab a free 30 days trial here.

Level: Advanced

Today you are going to learn how to point your own domain or sub-domain to your Amazon S3 account. In this setup, for example, when user access http://media.your-domain.com/you-file.pdf they actually download the file from Amazon S3.

Managing your files in Amazon S3 account is not much different from using FTP and your web hosting. Every time you upload file to Amazon S3 it gets two URLs that can be used to get access to it.

First URL looks like:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name/file_name.ext

Second URL looks like:

http://bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com/file_name.ext

As you can see, in a first example bucket name is used as part of file path and in a second example it is a part of domain name. These two URL are identical and point to the same file.

To configure your own sub-domain to point to Amazon S3, first you need to create a bucket with a name of your sub-domain. Use one of the tools from my previous blog post to do it. For example, for media.your-domain.com sub-domain you need to create a bucket with exactly the same name media.your-domain.com.

Next, using your DNS hosting provider for your-domain.com, create a CNAME record media that points to media.your-domain.com.s3.amazonaws.com.

The way you create a CNAME record depends on your domain DNS hosting provider. This example will show you how to do it with GoDaddy’s Total DNS Control.

Start with logging in to GoDaddy Control Panel. Select Domain Manager.

In the Domain Manager click the domain you’d like to use.

Scroll down until you see Total DNS menu. Go to Total DNS Control.

Click Add New CNAME Record button.

In the pop-up window enter a first part of a sub-domain name as an Alias Name. For media.your-domain.com it will be media.

After you finish, all files in media.your-domain.com bucket will be accessible using http://media.your-domain.com/file_name.ext URLs.

You can create separate Amazon S3 sub-domains for you web site images or large video files.

Please leave you comments and let me know what you think.

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Technorati Tags: amazon s3, dns, tutorial

Level: Beginner

So, you want to take advantage of scalable, reliable and cost effective solution for hosting your online videos? Here is your step-by-step guide on how to open Amazon S3 account and configure FLV Mate to use it.

Although creating account is free, you will need a credit card to sign up. Amazon will bill you monthly based on your account activities. If you don’t use your account and don’t put any data there, there will be no charge. When you start storing data and generate traffic, you will start to get billed.

Please review Amazon S3 pricing before opening your account. You can use this simple calculator to estimate your monthly Amazon S3 costs.

Having said that, let’s get started.

1. Sign up or Login to Amazon

Go to www.amazonaws.com and click Sign Up Now button.



Sign up for a new account or use your existing Amazon.com account if you wish.



2. Fill in an account form

Fill in the form and accept a service agreement.



3. Enable Amazon S3

Select Amazon Simple Storage Service from the list of services.



Click Sign Up For Amazon S3.



Review pricing and enter your credit card details.



4. Retrieve you Access Key and Secret key

Go to www.amazonaws.com and login.

Under You Account menu select Access Identifiers.



Get your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.



5. Configure FLV Mate

Open FLV Mate options screen and select S3 Account tab.



Paste your Access Key and Secret Key and click Test Connection.

If you’ve done every thing correctly you now have your own cloud-based video hosting service and ready to publish your first video with FLV Mate. Next time I will show you how to set up your own domain to be used with Amazon S3 (the upcoming version of FLV Mate will support it). You will be able to point media.youdomain.com to your Amazon S3 account.

Please leave you comments and let me know what you think.

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Technorati Tags: amazon s3, flv mate, tutorial

Today I’d like to introduce you to the best, to my opinion, tool for managing files in your Amazon S3 account.

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is a cloud based online storage and hosting service provided by Amazon. Initially it was created as an interface for developers to build their services on top of it. But its reliability combined with really moderate cost made it a perfect solution for offsite backup file storage, image hosting and streaming video publishing.

You can read more about Amazon S3 in FLV Mate FAQ.

1. JungleDisk ($30)

JungleDisk allows you to mount a bucket as a local disk drive. You can drag and drop files to this drive and they are uploaded to Amazon S3 in the background. You can automate backups using built in scheduler. JungleDisk works on Mac and PC and you can run it from a portable USB drive.

One of the cons is JungleDisk uses special proprietary way to store your files, so they don’t appear as normal files in other Amazo S3 clients. They provide open source library to retrieve your data from Amazon S3 and support so-called compatibility buckets that you can use with other clients though.

2. Gladinet Cloud Desktop (Free or $60)

Windows only tool to mount Amazon S3 as a local drive. It also supports mounting Google application like Google Docs and Picasa as local drives so you can manage your pictures and document from Windows Explorer.

The paid version is a bit pricy but they offer a discount for home users.

3. Cyberduck (Free)

Cyberduck is the ultimate Mac FTP client. It supports FTP, SFTP, WebDav and Amazon S3. It has slick interface with quickly accessible bookmarks and allows you to easy browse a deep folder structure. Best of all, it’s free.

4. Bucket Explorer ($40)

Two killer features of Bucket Explorer is a proxy with NTLM authentication support and file versioning. Apart from that it supports everything you can imagine and more. Runs on Windows and Mac.

5. S3Fox Organiser (Free)

S3Fox is not exactly an application but a Firefox browser add-on. You can use it to upload and download multiple files, set access permissions and manage Amazon CoundFront distributions. It supports drag’n’drop and folder synchronisation and runs on all platforms that Firefox runs on.

6. Cross FTP ($25)

Cross FTP is another multiprotocol, multiplatform file transfer client with Amazon S3 support. It lacks features comparing to competitors but you might like it if you prefer two panels, FileZila like interface. Can run off the USB drive.

7. S3 Browser (Free or $30)

S3 Browser is Windows only free S3 tool. It supports multiple Amazon S3 accounts, S3 metadata editing and bucket sharing on top of other features. You need to register if you use it for commercial purposes. It can run off the USB drive but you have to pay extra $10 for it.

8. Cloud Berry S3 Explorer (Free)

Free Windows tool with two panel interface. The killer feature of this program is tabs support, something I miss in Cyberduck. You can have several different sessions to different Amazon S3 accounts, or even S3 to S3 sessions open in the same window. Best free tool for Windows.

Conclusion

If you’d like to use Amazon S3 as an online backup solution, JungleDisk is a best tool that can mount Amazon S3 bucket as a local disk drive. It works on both Mac and PC. If you use Windows and want a free solution, check out Gladinet Cloud Desktop Starter.

If you use Mac, Cyberduck is the best remote file management program you can get. You can manage FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 using one easy to use interface. On Windows free Cloud Berry S3 Explorer does the trick.

Bucker Explorer is fantastic multiplatform tool if you prepared to pay premium.

I personally use JungleDisk on my Mac and PC laptops to store documents, photos and backups and manage my videos using Cyberduck.

Tell me about your favourite Amazon S3 tool by leaving a comment.

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Technorati Tags: amazon s3, review, tools

Welcome to the blog. It’s a good to have one and I should’ve started blogging even before I fired up my development environment to start writing FLV Mate. But what is done is done. I will keep you updated on the FLV Mate development. I also have some tutorial videos cooking so stay tuned. Talk to you soon.

Egor.

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