Setting Custom Metadata with FTP Batch Provisioning

Custom metadata is available only for Brightcove Pro and Enterprise customers. If you are interested in upgrading your Brightcove account, please contact Brightcove for more information.

After you have set up custom metadata for your Brightcove account, you can set values for the custom metadata fields of your videos. You can set and read metadata for a video using the Media module, FTP batch provisioning, or the Media API. This topic describes how to use Brightcove's FTP batch provisioning feature to set custom metadata for your videos. For introductory information, see Using FTP batch provisioning.

Before you begin

Before you can set custom metadata for your videos, you need to set up the custom metadata fields that you want to be available in your account. Read about how to do this. You also need to understand how to use Brightcove's FTP batch provisioning feature, including how to create an XML manifest for batch provisioning.

Setting custom metadata in an FTP batch provisioning manifest

You set custom metadata for a video by including one or more optional custom elements within a title element in your XML manifest. A title element can contain any number of custom metadata child elements.

Set string type custom metadata with a custom-string-value element. Use the name attribute to specify the name of the custom metadata field. In the following example, we have a custom metadata field named genre that we're setting to the string value Martial Arts:

<title name="Kung-Fu Web Designers"
    refid="desgowild0021"
    video-full-refid="desgowild0021.flv"
    thumbnail-refid="desgowild0021_thumb.jpg"
    video-still-refid="desgowild0021_still.jpg">
    <short-description>
      Web designers, kickin' butt and takin' names.
    </short-description>
    <custom-string-value name="genre">Martial Arts</custom-string-value>  
</title>

Set list (enum) type custom metadata with a custom-enum-value element. Use the name attribute to specify the name of the custom metadata field. In the following example, we have a custom metadata field named moonPhase that we're setting to the enum value gibbous:

<title name="Kung-Fu Web Designers"
    refid="desgowild0021"
    video-full-refid="desgowild0021.flv"
    thumbnail-refid="desgowild0021_thumb.jpg"
    video-still-refid="desgowild0021_still.jpg">
    <short-description>
      When the moon goes past half full, the web designers knock heads.
    </short-description>
    <custom-enum-value name="moonPhase">gibbous</custom-enum-value>  
</title>

If you specify an invalid value for the custom field in the batch manifest, for example a string value that is longer than 1024 characters, or a list value that does not exist in the list definition, then the update/creation of that title will fail and you will receive an error notification email with information about the erroroneous value.

Note that enum values are case-insensitive. So you could set the value in the example above as 'gibbous' or 'Gibbous' and the title would be updated successfully.