AWS Elemental MediaConvert fails to transcode some iOS videos that were transferred to MacBook

Question

We have recently migrated from Telestream Flip to AWS Elemental MediaConvert as our video transcoding solution. Most of the functionality works as expected, but we are encountering an issue when uploading videos from iOS devices via a desktop browser.

Here are the steps we follow:

1. Record a video on an iOS device using the camera or screen recording.
2. Transfer the video to a MacBook using Airdrop, iCloud, Photos, or other methods.
3. Upload the video through our web app.

However, when attempting to process the uploaded videos using MediaConvert, we encounter the following error for files with the extensions .mov or .MP4:

3404: '<https://SOME-BUCKET.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/2023/09/21/10/46/08/12345-1234-1234-1234-1a2a3a4a/some-video.mov?REMOVED=true>' not found.

We have verified that the file does exist in the specified bucket. Interestingly, if we change the file extension of any MP4 videos to lowercase (mp4), the upload and transcoding process is successful. However, no amount of modifying the file names for mov files seems to make a difference.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue when using AWS Elemental MediaConvert for transcoding iOS videos?

Answer 1

As the error states, the service could not access the file. If indeed the file exists in that location, the likely answer is a permissions issue.

• the file must exist
• the file be publicly accessible via http/https
• the file (object) itself must be world-readable either via living in a publicly accessible bucket, or having an access ACL

Simple test:

• Are you able to successfully access the same file URL with curl, ffplay, browser or mediainfo-cli?

• This test could be automated in response to errors appearing in CloudWatch logs ( MediaConvert -->CloudWatch--> CW Rule-->SNS-->Lambda w/ffmpeg layer)