How to Host and Link to Videos Using Amazon S3   3/9/2008 - 989 views, 1 Comment

The first thing you will need to do is sign up for your Amazon S3 account. You can do that by going here and clicking on the “Sign up for this web service” button on the upper righthand corner of the screen. It’s easy to sign up - super easy if you already have an Amazon account of any type, but even if you don’t already have an Amazon account, it’s easy to sign up for Amazon S3.

Once you are signed up, Amazon will send you a link in email to confirm the account. Click on that link, and it will take you to a page which shows you both your “key” and your “secret key”. Make a note of both of these (you’ll need to click on “show” to see your secret key).

The next thing you will do - in order to make this super easy - is download RJonna’s Firefox S3 plugin. If you aren’t already using Firefox, this is a very good reason to start - even if you only use Firefox for this one purpose! If you aren’t already using Firefox, you can get it for free, here:

Be sure to donate something to Rjonna, on the Firefox S3 plogin page, too!

Install the Firefox plugin (you’ll need to restart Firefox),and then select “S3 Organizer” from under “Tools”.

The first time you use the S3 Organizer, you’ll need to create an account name (this can be any name you choose) and input your key and secret key for the S3 Organizer to use. Then, when you select the S3 Organizer, it will show you a Finder-like or Explorer-like interface, with your computer on the left and your S3 ‘disk’ on the right. Nice!

Now you can easily copy any files you like from your computer to your S3 directory! When you first connect, you will see your top level directory in S3 (called “/”). In order to host files to link to from your website, you must create a new (sub) directory. For example, for our site, we have created a subdirectory called “TheInternetPatrol”. Note that Amazon interchangeably calls these “directories”, “folders” and “buckets”. For most purposes you can think of them as all the same thing. The S3 Organizer helpfully calls these “folders”, as that’s what most people are used to, but Amazon will often respond to a command with the term “bucket”. Don’t let it confuse you.

After you have created your subdirectory, you can upload images and video to it. Once you have done that, the only thing you need to do before you can link to it is change the permissions - that means make it so that others are allowed to access it.

Now, the item you use to change the permissions - to permit others to have access to your files - is named on S3 “ACL”. This is because Amazon really developed S3 for coders, developers and other geeks - and this is a term that most geeks know - it stands for “Access Control List” and most developers will use an ACL file - a file containing a list of every user or IP address allowed to access the resource - to control who gets access to a particular part of a website or a file.

All you need to know though is that the “ACL” option is where you make it so that others can see your image or video file, as the default is to protect it so that only you have permission to see your stuff (which is a good thing).

So, highlight the file you want to host on S3 - that you want to link to from your website - and then click on the ACL button. The ACL button looks like this:

When you click on it, you’ll see this (we are using the file “test.jpg” for this purpose):

See how “Everyone” has a big red X under ‘Read’? You want to click on that, and change it so that you allow everyone to ‘read’ the file. When you change it, it will look like this, with a big green check mark under ‘Read’:

Now you are ready to link away to your file!

To do this, the URL you use is this:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/

..followed by your subdirectory (bucket) name, and the file name. So in this case, our subdirectory is “TheInternetPatrol”, and the file name is “test.jpg”, so here is the link:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/theinternetpatrol/test.jpg

(Note that URLs are not case sensitive, except for the file name itself.)

So, what did you see when you followed that link?

(Yes, that is a picture of yours truly.)

Now you know how to host video and images, and how to link to your video and images, on Amazon S3!