S3 Video Streaming Demo

Demo for Streaming a video from S3 through a webserver.

Running the Application

1. Make sure you have git, nodejs, and npm installed on your machine. Installation instructions for your platform are readily available with a simple google search.
2. This demo also assume that you already have an AWS account with read/write access to S3.
3. Check out the project and cd into the project root.
4. Install the npm dependencies: npm install
5. Configure your machine as an AWS client. Instructions may vary by programming language SDK used. For node.js, the instructions can be found here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/guide/node-configuring.html
6. Upload a video to s3 to {bucketName}/sl-tmp/9781921910000/9781921910000-samplevid.mp4.
7. Run the application: REGION=us-east-1 S3_HOST=s3.amazonaws.com BUCKET={bucketName} npm start
8. Direct your browser to http://localhost:3000/index.html

Key points

1. Notice how in index.html the <video> tag is pointing at a resource on the local webserver. We want to stream the video through our local server rather than directly from s3. This allows us a great deal more flexibility in our implementation:

• We can stream private S3 objects. Obviously, we won't want to make vendor content public on S3. In order to stream private objects, we must configure the AWS_ACCESS_ID and SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. For obvious security reasons, this should never be done via javascript in the browser.
• We can dynamically support S3-like hosting environments. OpenStack Swift implements the S3 api but servers will never live at s3.amazonaws.com (the default S3 hostname). By simply configuring the AWS SDK (via the S3_HOST environment variable in this case) to point at the OpenStack Swift host URL, we can support OpenStack Swift stored files using the AWS S3 SDK/API.

2. Notice in server/routes/api.js how we intercept calls to /video/* and use the server/controllers/s3controller.js to stream the requested video to the browser.

Disclaimer This is not production ready code and should not be treated as such. This is for demonstration purposes only.