Ingesting WebVTT Files

Dynamic Ingest can be used to ingest WebVTT files (for captions, subtitles, chapters, etc.) with your video, or separately, after the video has been ingested. For Dynamic Delivery videos, you can also ingest SRT or DFXP captions, and Brightcove will convert them to WebVTT automatically. This topic explains the details of adding text tracks files to your videos using the Dynamic Ingest API.

Setup

The setup for Dynamic Ingest requests is the same, whether you are ingesting a video, images, a WebVTT file, or all of these:

Request URL

        https://ingest.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/account_id/videos/video_id/ingest-requests

Authentication

Authentication requires an access token passed as a Bearer token in an Authorization header:

        Authorization: Bearer {access_token}

Note on S3

If your WebVTT will be pulled from a protected S3 bucket, you will need to set a bucket policy to allow Video Cloud to access the files. See Using Dynamic Ingest with S3 for details.

Ingest WebVTT files

You can also add WebVTT captions to your video or upload them for an existing video using Dynamic Ingest:

Add text tracks during video ingestion

Request URL

        https://ingest.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/account_id/videos/video_id/ingest-requests

Method

POST

Sample request body

        {
            "master": {
                "url":"http://learning-services-media.brightcove.com/videos/mp4/Water-Droplet.mp4"
            },
            "capture-images": false,
            "text_tracks": [
                {
        "url": "http://learning-services-media.brightcove.com/captions/for_video/Water-in-Motion.vtt",
        "srclang": "en",
        "kind": "captions",
        "label": "English",
        "default": true
                }
            ]
        }

Adding/converting SRT or DFXP

For Dynamic Delivery videos only, you can ingest SRT or DFXP files in the same way. The Video Cloud ingest system will automatically convert them to WebVTT format and add them to the video.

        {
            "text_tracks": [
              {
                "url": "http://media.brightcove.com/captions/Water.dfxp",
                "srclang": "fr",
                "kind": "captions",
                "label": "français",
                "default": true
              }
            ]
          }

Add text tracks existing videos

Adding text tracks to existing videos is exactly the same, except that you do not need any of the video information or the profile in the request body.

Request URL

        https://ingest.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/account_id/videos/video_id/ingest-requests

Method

POST

Sample request body

        {
          "text_tracks": [
            {
              "url": "http://learning-services-media.brightcove.com/captions/for_video/Water-in-Motion.vtt",
              "srclang": "es",
              "kind": "captions",
              "label": "Español",
              "default": true
            }
          ]
        }

Notes:

Caption file names should only include letters (upper or lower case), numbers, dashes (-) and underscores (_).
The label for the captions is used by the Brightcove player for the captions language menu. Best practice is to use the appropriate language for the label. For example: français for French and so forth.
The text of the captions must be encoded UTF-8 to diplay properly for double-byte languages such as Japanese and Korean.
The default value is not per track, but set to true for all tracks of the same language (srclang)
For images and text tracks, only public HTTP or HTTPS URLs or signed S3 URLs are supported
for text tracks, Dynamic Ingest adds/appends them to the video’s vtt list even if it’s a re-encode request. you should use the CMS API to manage them (update/delete)
Dynamic Ingest accepts up to 100 text tracks at a time
Although "mime_type": "text/vtt" is generally supported for WebVTT, Dynamic Ingest does not currently allow that field for ingestion of text tracks

Adding text tracks to a remote asset video

See Adding Text Tracks to Remote Asset Videos.