Creating Videos with Remote Video Files Using FTP Batch Provisioning

FTP batch provisioning and remote assets are features that are available only for Video Cloud Pro and Enterprise customers. If you are interested in upgrading your Video Cloud account, please contact Brightcove for more information.

This topic describes how to create videos in your Video Cloud account using remote assets together with the Video Cloud FTP batch provisioning system. Read Creating Videos with Remote Video Files for an overview.

As an alternative to using FTP batch provisioning, you can create videos with remote assets using:

• the Media module in the Video Cloud Studio
• the Media API

After you create a video using the remote assets approach, you can edit and manage your videos using the Video Cloud Studio, FTP batch provisioning, or the Video Cloud Media API.

Before you begin

In the procedure described in this topic, you use the Video Cloud FTP batch provisioning system to create videos. In order to create videos with remote assets, you need to have your Video Cloud account configured to enable FTP batch provisioning. In addition, some additional account configuration is required, beyond the standard FTP 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 the Video Cloud FTP batch provisioning process.

Accessing remote assets

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 the remote assets should be the URL of the assets in the CDN and not the URL on the origin server.

Creating a video with remote assets

You create videos with remote video files by describing them in a batch provisioning manifest and then uploading the batch provisioning manifest to the Video Cloud 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 Video Cloud 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.

Remote asset element attributes

The remote-asset element uses these attributes:

Streaming remote assets

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 Video Cloud image capture tool to create still images from the video.

Setting the controller-type

In the remote-asset element, you may need to set the controller-type attribute, depending on how you are delivering content and what CDN you are using. Here are the possible values for controller-type: