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Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app now does video uploads & streaming on Android

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app for Android, which previously only handled photo uploads to Amazon’s cloud storage service offering users 5GB for free, was just updated with the ability to upload and stream videos. Version 1.7 of the app will allow users to upload and download videos up to 20 minutes in length and 2GB in size, and will also stream video to any of your Android devices supporting the new video features (the iOS app equivalent is yet to be updated).

A blog post by Amazon outlining the technology behind the new video feature says the app supports more than 20 file formats and 40 video codecs:

The team wanted to allow users to upload and view almost any video. The Elastic Transcoder allows them to support more than 20 file formats and 40 video codecs, including videos captured on archaic devices and stored in obsolete formats. Because Cloud Drive already stored uploaded files in Amazon S3 (they also make heavy use of EC2, SQS, SNS, CloudFront and DynamoDB), it was easy for the team to get started. They created an initial set of transcoding pipelines, decided on the set of output formats that they wanted to support, and created Elastic Transcoding presets as needed… In order to provide a great user experience, the team set a goal of having finished videos available 15 minutes or less after they were uploaded. They were able to over-achieve on this goal and report that videos are often ready within a minute or two.

Perhaps Amazon will soon change the app’s name to better reflect its new video capabilities.

The updated app also includes a few other features, including larger preview images in landscape view. Full release notes below:

What’s New

Included in version 1.7:
– Protect your personal videos in your Cloud Drive
– Auto-Save video from your device directly to your Cloud Drive
– Manually upload or download video up 2GB or 20 minutes in length
– Play back saved video streamed instantly to any device
– See large preview images when scrolling in landscape view
Included in version 1.6.110510g:
– Fixes crash on loading device album covers
– Fixes upload problems for Amazon.cn customers

(via TechCrunch)

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Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s weekly Logic Pros series and makes music as one half of Toronto-based Makamachine.