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Media companies are already taking this approach using ffmpeg, AWS Lambda, and AWS Step Functions. I heard from two companies using such approaches at AWS re:Invent in October 2017, so it's definitely possible.

Rolling your own approach like this is certainly more complex to build/maintain than using Elastic Transcoder though.

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If you know that you'll need more than 8 minutes, why wouldn't you just run ffmpeg on EC2? EC2 is now pay-per-second. I haven't looked at the prices recently, is AWS lambda so much cheaper that it's worth jumping through all these extra hoops?

You can encode about 1 video per EC2 medium instance without losing >1:1 encoding speed. It’s horrendously expensive.

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