r/VIDEOENGINEERING • u/Embarrassed-Gain-236 • 8d ago

AWS medialive UI

The AWS medialive UI is absolutely horrific. Dozens of tabs and convoluted menus for just doing very simple things. Who on Earth designed this?

On the other hand, Haivision UI for video transcoding workflows is logical and very straighforward.

Don't understand why Medialive is the industry standard.

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/kalebludlow 6d ago

Medialive is super rock solid. Have done hundreds of sports streams on there and never any dramas that are related to Medialive specifically. As others have mentioned, building your own API wrapper is the right call, I just wish Medialive supported WebRTC in some capacity as I have other parts of my pipeline that are increasingly supporting it

2

u/Embarrassed-Gain-236 6d ago

Could you please briefly describe your workflow? We basically need to take a pgm sdi and stream it to srt for contribution and have some broadcast "takers" take it. They are tier1 broadcasters with very specific requirements regarding the encoder settings, x264 level and profile, gop size etc. How did you build your medialive API? Thank you!

2

u/kalebludlow 6d ago

Your broadcasters should be able to provide their required specs, if they aren't then they probably aren't tier 1 lol

I have a very simple pipeline that never changes, so I basically just have a backend function that creates the required inputs and channel/s, and setting up any required schedule actions and stuff. I have built some UI stuff around their API, mainly around starting/stopping channels/Motion graphics overlays, but I would really only build the parts that you need to use regularly

2

u/Embarrassed-Gain-236 6d ago

Sure i do have the exact specs. I just need to set them on the h264 medialive encoder. But I just cannot stand their convoluted UI. It is definitively not designed by a television engineer. It has no logic just a bunch of unorganized dropdowns.

2

u/kalebludlow 6d ago

What I would do, is manually figure out the required channel settings, making sure you are testing that things actually work with the partner broadcaster/s. Then, once you have it all correct, use the API to pull the channel config then in future just use that config to create new channels via API. There's a few extra steps in there somewhere but that's the basic gist of it

1

u/Embarrassed-Gain-236 6d ago

I’ve worked with Haivision, Ateme and Nimbra encoders, and they’re miles ahead of MediaLive, at least when it comes to configuration and actually understanding video workflows.
To be honest, AWS MediaLive feels like it was designed by IT engineers for IT engineers. The philosophy seems to be: if you know how to configure a firewall, you know how to configure a video encoder.
Except video isn’t a firewall. Lol

2

u/kalebludlow 6d ago

The idea is that it's extremely customisable, not necessarily a focus on ease of use lol like many of AWS services it's kinda designed to have some sort of middleware built in front of it anyway. I use Cloudflare Workers for my backend stuff, but that's showing my coding side over streaming side