Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Elastic Transcoder for Amazon Web Services for transcoding video files between different digital media formats. You can use the service, which Amazon says is highly scalable, to convert video files from their source format into versions that will play on smartphones, tablets and PCs.

“For example, customers can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert their large high resolution ‘master’ video files into smaller versions that are optimized for playback on websites, mobile devices, connected TV’s and other video platforms,” the company says. “Amazon Elastic Transcoder removes the need to manage infrastructure and transcoding software, providing scalability and performance by leveraging AWS services. The service manages all aspects of the transcoding process transparently and automatically. It also supports pre-defined transcoding presets that make it easy to transcode video for smartphones, tablets, web browsers and other devices. With Amazon Elastic Transcoder, customers can create enterprise, training, user-generated, broadcast, or other video content for their applications or websites.”

On the product page, Amazon says:

Amazon Elastic Transcoder manages all aspects of the transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding “job” specifying the location of your source video and how you want it transcoded. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices. All these features are available via service APIs and the AWS Management Console.

There are no contracts or monthly commitments to use the service. You pay based on the minutes you need to transcode and the resolution of the content.

Check out Elastic Transcoder here.