Digital Master Delete API

Introduction

The CMS API has a feature to delete the digital master (source file for a video) in the Video Cloud catalog. This will permit you to perform one-time cleanup tasks to decrease the size of your managed content.

To understand how masters are archived, and how you can prevent them from being archived at all - if that is what you want to do - see Archiving Masters.

Requirements

Deletion of digital masters can be performed using the CMS API only - this option will not be available in Studio.

Implications of deleting masters

Before you proceed, be sure you understand the following implications of deleting digital masters:

You will no longer be able to re-transcode a video after its master is deleted. If you need new renditions, you will have to replace the video through Studio or the Dynamic Ingest API.
Managing videos via Batch Provisioning (deprecated) will no longer work. Use the CMS and Dynamic Ingest APIs instead.
Deleting a digital master is a permanent operation. We cannot restore deleted digital masters.

Steps: deleting a digital master

Follow the following steps to delete a digital master.

Be sure you have your own copy of the master in case you ever need it.
If you need to retranscode any videos, do so before deleting the master. After the master is deleted you will no longer be able to retranscode the video.

Obtain the necessary client credentials for the operation. The client credentials must include permissions for the following operations:

      [
          "video-cloud/asset/delete",
          "video-cloud/video/read"
      ]

These permissions are not available in the Studio UI, so you will need to use the OAuth API to obtain them. Below is a cURL command that will do the job if you replace the highlighted items with your own information:

      curl --request POST \
        --url https://oauth.brightcove.com/v4/client_credentials \
        --header 'authorization: BC_TOKEN YOUR_BC_TOKEN' \
        --header 'content-type: application/json' \
        --data '{
        "type": "credential",
        "maximum_scope": [
          {
            "identity": {
              "type": "video-cloud-account",
              "account-id": YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID
            },
            "operations": [
          "video-cloud/asset/delete",
          "video-cloud/video/read"
      ]
          }
        ],
        "name": "Delete-Masters"
      }'

To obtain your BC_TOKEN, open any Studio page (you need to be an administrator on the account), open the JavaScript console in your browser, paste in the Javascript code below and press return (enter):

      var cookiesArray = document.cookie.split(";"), cookiesObj = {}, i, tmpArray = [];
      for (i = 0; i < cookiesArray.length; i++) {
          tmpArray = cookiesArray[i].split("=");
          if (tmpArray[0].indexOf('BC_TOKEN') > -1) {
              cookiesObj.BC_TOKEN = tmpArray[1];
          }
      }
      window.prompt("BC_TOKEN:", cookiesObj.BC_TOKEN);

Use the client credentials to generate an access token

Delete digital masters using these endpoints.

Delete Master
Base URL	`https://cms.api.brightcove.com/v1`
Method	`DELETE`
Endpoint	`/accounts/accountID/videos/videoID/digital_master`
Header	`Authorization: Bearer Authorization: Bearer {access_token}`
Response	204 NO_CONTENT (204 is a standard response for delete operations, indicating that the operation was successful, or that the asset had already been deleted.)