Conditional Output

Limitations

Why skip renditions?

Skipping renditions is useful if the source videos you ingest vary widely in quality. This is often case, for example, for news organizations that use video captured by phones or other devices in the field.

Without conditional outputs, the Dynamic Ingest system will created exactly as many renditions as are specified in the profile.

For example, let's say you ingest a low-quality video (video bitrate around 820 kbps) using a profile that includes the following unconditional video renditions.

The resulting renditions in Studio would look something like this:

Note that the last three (highlighted) HLS renditions are identical in bitrate, and that the bitrate is only marginally higher than the next best HLS rendition. Also note that the difference in the bitrates for two best MP4 renditions is small. The reason for this is that transcoding can never improve on the bitrate of the source, and the source here had an average bitrate of around 800 kbps, so renditions with higher specified bitrates end up with something in that range (you'll see small differences because of different ways that average bitrate is calculated for segmented and non-segmented video formats).

The last four renditions in the set, then, are essentially redundant, offering little if any improvement in quality over the "lower-quality" renditions, but they are created and stored anyway. This can be prevented by using conditional outputs that prevent a rendition from being generated if the source doesn't match the quality criteria you specify.

Implementation

You can add a skip object to some of the renditions. The skip object contains one or more conditions, and if these conditions are not met, the rendition will not be created.

Notes on usage

1. An ingest profile must include at least one non-skippable rendition - if you try to create a profile in which all renditions are skippable, you will receive an error.
2. You must insure that at least one rendition is created for every content type. For example:
   • If you create both audio-only and video renditions, you must have a non-skippable rendition for each
   • If you use DRM, you must have a non-skippable rendition for each format that works with that DRM type (Smooth, HLS, DASH, etc.)

Syntax

The syntax for the skip object you can add to a rendition specification is as follows:

"skip": {
    "condition1": "value1",
    "condition2": 1300,
    ...etc
}

Example

"renditions": [
    {
      "media_type": "video",
      "reference_id": "ts1",
      "format": "ts",
      "type": "segmented",
      "audio_codec": "aac",
      "audio_bitrate": 96,
      "video_bitrate": 1200.
      "video_codec": "h264",
      "keyframe_rate": 0.5,
      "max_frame_rate": 30,
      "width": 1280,
      "height": 720,
      "h264_profile": "main",
      "skip": {
          "min_video_bitrate": 1000,
          "min_size": "640x360"
        }
    },
    ... etc
]

For the profile (fragment) above, the rendition shown will be created only if the source video has a video bitrate of at least 1000 kbps and a frame size of at least 640px x 360px.

Skip fields

Below are the fields (conditions) that can be used in the skip object: