In case you have custom file formats in MediaLab, or you would like to provide your own version for an existing format, new formats can be added to existing files using special pull profiles. This can be implemented using the REST API or with 2 pull profiles working together (one for the source file, one for the extra format). For more advanced cases, there are other ways to set this up, please contact our support desk for assistance.
- Upload to REST API
- Upload using pull profiles
Manually uploading a format to an existing file can be used if you do custom transcoding yourself (e.g. for on-premise platforms), or to make additional formats available for download to your users.
Example
In the following example, we will assume 2 video versions that are uploaded to MediaLab:
- Source file (MP4 high resolution) - available for download, previewing and sharing.
- Broadcast version (MXF HD) - MXF file, that can be shared to users for download .
We could upload both versions as independent files, but instead we want to add the Broadcast MXF version as format of same file. This way, when we share a link to the file, we can choose to enable the download of the Broadcast MXF version.
Step 1: Pull profile for source file
First, we will create a new pull profile, and check the "Format only" checkbox. As format, we will then select the "source" format. Any files uploaded to this pull profile, will now be imported as regular file, but will have a flag toggled so that MediaLab knows we might be expecting additional versions for this file.
Step 2: Pull profile for broacast version
Then, we create a second pull profile, again checking the "Format only" checkbox. But now, instead of source, we will select the additional format that we want to upload, in our case "Broadcast MXF".
And that's it! After a source file has been imported, any files uploaded to the second profile will be matched to the first profile. They will be matched by filename (minus the extension), and if found, the format will be added to the original file in MediaLab.
To test if this works as expected, here are a couple of tips:
- Files uploaded to the source profile, will have their
Referencemeta-data field set to their original filename. - Incoming files to the format profile, will have their extension matched against the expected format extension (e.g. mxf),
and then the base of the filename matched against files with their
Referenceset accordingly. - If you open the "Download" dialog of a file, you will see all available formats for that file.
- It is possible to use regular expressions to change the file names after uploading. If this is not available in your account, please contact us.
- Transcode can be disabled for uploaded files if you wish to supply your own transcoded version for online playback.