Creating Checksums for FTP Batch Provisioning

This topic describes how to create the optional MD5 checksum that you can include in an FTP batch provisioning manifest. For information about FTP batch provisioning, read Using FTP Batch Provisioning.

For each file you upload with FTP batch provisioning, you can optionally include an MD5 checksum (sometimes called a hash) as part of the XML manifest. The MD5 checksum is a unique code that allows Video Cloud to validate that the file was transferred successfully. Therefore, using a checksum can help you detect and troubleshoot upload problems. There are many tools you can use to create an MD5 checksum for a file, including MD5summer for Windows or MD5 Checksum for Mac OS. Your MD5 checksum application will generate for each file a string like this, d689386b367ac0f6db424f6e47ea1c06, which you include in your XML manifest.

If you use a checksum in your XML manifest, include it as the value of the hash-code attribute in the <asset> tag for the file. For example, if you are uploading a video file named Off to the races.mp4 with an MD5 checksum equal to d689386b367ac0f6db424f6e47ea1c06, the asset tag might look like this:

<asset filename="Off to the races.mp4"  
  refid="races-2010"
  size="188812"
  hash-code="d689386b367ac0f6db424f6e47ea1c06"
  display-name="Off to the races"
  type="VIDEO_FULL"/>

Read more about the <asset> tag in your XML manifest.