Friday, March 6, 2015

Amazon Prime: How to Get Unlimited VIDEO Storage!

Amazon Prime is a good membership to have, at least it is for me. There are some decent benefits to having it. Recently, Amazon Prime members have received the ability to have unlimited storage for photos. Of course, videos can be huge, so they likely decided against unlimited video uploads immediately. However, I am going to teach you a technique that will allow you to bypass this restriction...


Amazon Prime Benefits
Besides the normal 2-day shipping, and free video library, Amazon Prime members get a few other benefits. One is that a Prime member can allow up to four members of their "household" to latch on to that same account. That's a little less than $20 split five ways!

Another benefit is that if a package comes later than shipped - and I believe this also applies if you pay for shipping - you can receive a month of prime free. Of course, I doubt they'll just give it to you, you would need to call in and demand it.

A final benefit not already mentioned, is that Amazon Prime members can get early access to certain Lightning Deals Amazon offers. It's usually only 30 minutes before, but on some items, this is an absolute necessity!

Amazon Prime Photo & Video Storage
As an Amazon Prime member you automatically receive unlimited photo storage regardless of type or size. As for videos, a Prime member is automatically allotted 5GB of storage. You can pay monthly subscriptions for more, but considering that other places offer better deals, it's not very enticing as an option.

If It Were Easy...
The easiest solution to think of for bypassing the video storage capacity issue is to rename a video with a picture extension. This would be great, if it worked.

I tried both the Android Amazon Photo app, and the web app, but neither could be tricked into thinking that a video was a picture of some sort. I used .JPEG, .BMP, .PNG, and .GIF. I even tried a .JP2 and a .RAW to be absolutely sure. I assume that Amazon's software is "smart enough" to differentiate video data for what it is.

You can check this yourself by uploading a video with a picture extension and then checking your storage capacity. It can take a few minutes to update, but it will show that you ARE using some of your 5GB.

The Road Less Traveled
The method needed to store videos requires a bit of work on the user's part. This method is best used for people who have very little storage space available to them, but need to somehow store a video for later:

  1. Choose a video you want to upload.
  2. You will need either the VLC player (free), or another program that can extract images from video. You can also use video-editing software and output each image.
  3. If you are using the VLC player, follow the links and create the numerous images that will be extracted from your video.
  4. Once you have all your pictures, open up your Amazon Web Photo & Video Storage web app.
  5. Upload all your photos!

Note: You should be able to do the reverse to convert the pictures back into a video. You should also be able to use QuickTime. Video-editing software will also work.

I should add that you can use your Amazon Photo Storage iOS or Android app, or the PC desktop software, if you prefer. I assume most people who would do this would be on a computer, so it would be superfluous to do this on your smartphone.

Also, if possible, I would use something like JPEG 2000, as it is meant for videos and is much higher quality than a JPEG, and likely other picture formats when concerning video. Something like Photoshop might be best if attempting to use JPEG 2000.

Roll Credits
This is a basic way to get your videos into the cloud for free (minus a Amazon Prime subscription). It takes a bit of work to get the videos up there, but it is fairly simple and fast to do. If I ever run out of cloud storage, or have a load of files that start ranging in the terabytes, this would be my method of choice to store them.

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