FTP batch provisioning and remote assets are features that are available only for Brightcove Pro and Enterprise customers. If you are interested in upgrading your Brightcove account, please contact Brightcove for more information.
This topic describes how to create videos in your Brightcove account using remote assets. In the standard procedure for creating videos in your Brightcove account, you upload video files, which then are maintained in Brightcove's system, together with their names, descriptions, tags, and other metadata. Under an alternative procedure, remote assets, you maintain your video files on your own or a third-party system and provide Brightcove with the URL of the video file when you create the video. Using the remote assets approach, you can still edit and manage your videos using the Brightcove Studio, FTP batch provisioning, or the Brightcove Media API.
Remote assets are also used for live streaming in Brightcove players. Read more about delivering live streams.
When you use the remote assets procedure, you must use the Brightcove FTP batch provisioning system to create videos. In order to use remote assets, some additional account configuration is required, beyond the standard batch provisioning setup. Please contact Brightcove customer support to confirm that your account has been configured to support remote assets before uploading an XML manifest that uses remote assets.
You should also familiarize yourself with Brightcove's FTP batch provisioning process.
All of your remote asset files must be available at a public URL, without any requirements for authentication or access control. If your remote assets are hosted by a CDN, the URL of remote assets should be the URL of the assets in the CDN and not the URL on the origin server.
You create videos with remote video files by describing them in a batch provisioning manifest and then uploading the batch provisioning manifest to Brightcove's FTP servers. This process is described in Using FTP Batch Provisioning. For each video you want to create using a remote asset, include a remote-asset element. The remote-asset element takes the place of the asset element in the batch provisioning manifest. When Brightcove processes your manifest, each remote-asset element is translated into a separate video in your account.
The remote asset tag is an optional child element of the publisher-upload-manifest element and is structured as follows:
<remote-asset refid="asset1"
display-name="My Video"
type="VIDEO_FULL"
remote-url="http://storage.remote.com/mylocation/movie.flv"
size="188812"
video-duration="500000"
video-codec="SORENSON"/>
There must be a remote-asset element for each file from the remote location.
The remote-asset element uses these attributes:
| attribute | required? | description |
|---|---|---|
| refid | yes | A unique identifier for the asset, so that title elements can reference it from within the manifest file. |
| display-name | yes | A name for the file. |
| type | yes | The Brightcove file type. This field must be exactly one of the following strings:
|
| remote-url | yes | The complete path to the file hosted on the remote server. If the file is served using progressive download, then you must include the file name and extension for the file. You can also use a URL that re-directs to a URL that includes the file name and extension. If the file is served using Flash streaming, use the remote-stream-name attribute to provide the stream name. See Accessing remote assets. |
| remote-stream-name | required for streaming assets; optional for progressive download | A stream name for Flash streaming appended to the value of the remote-url attribute. See Accessing remote assets. |
| size | yes | The size of the file in bytes (not kilobytes nor megabytes, just bytes). |
| frame-height | no | The height of the image in pixels. |
| frame-width | no | The width of the image in pixels. |
| encoding-rate | Required for multiple renditions | For multi-bitrate streaming renditions, the encoding rate in bits per second. For example, 150 kbps is specified as 150000. |
| video-duration | Required for video assets only | The length of the remote video asset in milliseconds. This must be a whole number with no decimal places. For live streams, set this to -1. |
| video-codec | Required for video assets only | This field must be exactly one of the following strings:
|
| controller-type | Required for live streams only | Depending on your CDN, one of LIMELIGHT_LIVE, AKAMAI_LIVE or LIVE_STREAMING |
If your remote assets are served by streaming, rather than progressive download, you need to be sure to specify both the remote-url and the remote-stream-name attributes. For example, if your file's full streaming URL is rtmp://flv.example.com/flash/streams/myDir/streamName.flv, set the remote-url attribute to the connect URL, like this:
remote-url="rtmp://flv.example.com/flash/"
and set the remote-stream-name attribute to the stream name, like this:
remote-stream-name="streams/myDir/streamName"
omitting the .flv file suffix.
Note: If you create a video using a streaming remote video file, you cannot use the Brightcove image capture tool to create still images from the video.