Introduction
If you archive a master when you ingest a video, you will be able to re-transcode the video later without ingesting it again. This topic explains your options for archiving your masters. Note that archiving the master means storing the master video file in your account so that it is available for future processing. See Creating Ingest Profiles for Dynamic Delivery for more information.
Note that if you store the digital master when you ingest the video, and then retranscode the video using a profile that does not archive masters, the digital master for the video will not be removed, and you will still be able to retranscode the video.
Archiving a master
To archive a master for your video, you need to include the digital_master
object in your ingest profile:
{
"account_id": 3423487123048,
"digital_master": {
"rendition": "passthrough",
"distribute": false
},
"name": "nondrm-default",
...
}
Source or rendition
For Dynamic Delivery (including Context Aware Encoding) profiles, you can archive the video source file as a master (in other words, set "rendition": "passthrough"
in the digital_master
part of the profile). The digital_master will not be distributed (pushed to the CDN as an available rendition) for these profiles, even if you set "distribute": true
.
For Legacy Ingest profiles, you can choose to use your video source file as the master, or you can select a high-quality rendition to use as the master.
To use the video source file you ingest as the master, include the following code in your ingest profile:
"digital_master": {
"rendition": "passthrough",
"distribute": false
}
To use a rendition for the master instead of your source file (Legacy Ingest profiles only), set the rendition
field of the digital_master
object to the reference id for the rendition:
"digital_master": {
"rendition": "av0",
"distribute": true
},
"name": "nondrm-av0",
"packages": [],
"renditions": [
{
"media_type": "video",
"reference_id": "av0", ...
If you set rendition
to none
, no master will be archived, and you will not be able to retranscode the video. You can, however, replace the video by ingesting it again.
Distribution
Distribution will only work for Legacy Ingest profiles.
You can choose whether the master is distributed or not. Distributed means that the master is pushed to the CDN and available as a playable rendition. If the master is not distributed, it is archived by Video Cloud but not pushed to the CDN.
- If you selected one of your renditions to be the master, and set
distribute
tofalse
, that rendition will not be pushed to the CDN and will not be available for playback - If the rendition is set to
passthrough
anddistribute
totrue
, the master will only be distributed if it is in h264 format - The original video may be modified in order to make it playable over the internet. The archived master will be identical to the original file, however, except in very rare cases where we need to modify it in order to transcode it
- Distributing the master does not work for videos ingested using Dynamic Delivery profiles. If you look at the Dynamic Delivery ingest profiles, you will see that
distribute
is set tofalse
. If you duplicate the profile and attempt to change that in Studio, the value will revert tofalse
automatically.
To distribute the master to the CDN, set "distribute": true
in the digital_master
object:
"digital_master": {
"distribute": true,
"rendition": "passthrough"
}
To prevent the master from being distributed, set distribute
to false:
"digital_master": {
"distribute": false,
"rendition": "passthrough"
}
Default behavior
By default (if the profile does not include a digital_master
field), the Dynamic Ingest API and Upload Module will behave exactly as if the following had been included in the profile:
"digital_master": {
"distribute": false,
"rendition": "none"
}
In other words, no digital master will be stored.
If you have the following in your profile:
"digital_master": {
"distribute": false
}
... with no rendition
field to specify what should be archived, the source video will be archived as the digital master.
Standard profiles
The standard profiles for Dynamic Delivery as well as the legacy ingest system will automatically store masters but not distribute them:
Standard Dynamic Delivery profiles
- multi-platform-extended-static
- multi-platform-extended-static-with-MP4
- multi-platform-standard-static
- multi-platform-standard-static-with-MP4
- multi-platform-extended-dynamic
- multi-platform-extended-dynamic-with-MP4
- multi-platform-standard-dynamic
- multi-platform-standard-dynamic-with-MP4
- low-bandwidth-dynamic
Standard legacy ingest system profiles
- videocloud-default-v1
- high-definition
- audio-only
- single-bitrate-standard
- single-bitrate-high
- screencast-1280
- smart-player-transition