Setting Up FTP Feeds

yospaceCDS can accept content uploaded by standard FTP. The option Create FTP Input Feed listed under Input Management allows you to set-up an FTP account and the other details associated with getting content ingested into a Content Group or Content Groups.

Setting Up An FTP Feed

Set up FTP Input Feed

The following fields are required when setting up a new FTP Input Feed:

Name: The text label that you will to use to identify the FTP Input Feed in the list of other Input Feeds, for example "Business News UK"
Description: Any additional information that you want to use to identify your Input Feed
FTP User Name: Set the second part of the FTP username of the account that will be created. The user name that you must use, is the combination of your prefix and dash (-) and the second part that you provide in the form. For example, your FTP user name may look something like examplecorp-biznews. Please note, this is case sensitive.
FTP Password: the password that will be used to identify the FTP user. Please note, this is case sensitive.
Type: Select the feed type that suits you best, read the section below on the different types of XML Metadata format. If need a custom XML format, please contact support.
Category: This allows you to set-up category filtering on the FTP Input Feed. See the section below more detail on this.
IP White List: A comma-separated list of IP addresses that you only wish to allow connections to your FTP account from. Leaving this field blank means that all IP addresses will be allowed, however we recommend that you do lock down your FTP account to trusted IP addresses only. Octet-level wildcards are also supported. Example: 217.124.12.124, 217.124.12.125, 217.12.23.*
Remove Content: "When it disappears from the FTP account" should be selected if you intend to remove items from the resulting feed by removing them from the FTP account. This setting will have no effect if you are simply 'pushing' content to the FTP account, in which case you may wish to choose to remove content after a certain time period which is what the option below provides (when it is selected, of course).
Maximum Items: Allows you to set the maximum number of items in the resulting feed. You have the choice of refusing further content submissions, or deleting the oldest. Remember you can also delete content manually through the Content Management tool.
State: Set Active if you want to make the FTP account immediately available. If you leave it Inactive, you can always activate it later.
Feed Into Group: Specify the Content Group into which content will be placed through this feed. It is possible to feed into more than one group. To do this, you must first set-up the feed, then go back to edit it, and add the additional Content Groups there.

Category Filtering

It is possible to set-up more than one FTP Input Feed with the same account. This is useful if the CMS that is sending content to yospaceCDS cannot differentiate content categories by feeding into different FTP accounts. For example, you have a single FTP account setup for all news videos, say meganews-ftpfeed and you have XML metadata indicating which news category each video should be in (for example, World News, Financial News, Entertainment News, etc). FTP Input Feed category filtering allows you to feed specific Content Groups based on the XML category metadata provided.

For the example given above, it would be necessary to create multiple FTP Input Feeds all with the same FTP Username and Password but set the Category field in each FTP Input Feed set-up to the corresponding value that will appear in the XML Metadata supplied. For example, WORLD, FINANCIAL, ENTERTAINMENT, etc. Each FTP Input Feed would then be set-up to feed into its own specific Content Group. If you wanted to maintain a Content Group containing a superset of all categories, then you would need to set-up each FTP Input Feed to feed into its specific group and the superset group.

When working with categories, please bear the following in mind:

The XML Metadata must specify the appropriate category, and the way that is done will depend on what Feed Type you chose when setting up the feed. The following section explains the syntax of each Feed Type
If an item is fed without a category, it will be caught by an FTP Input Feed where you not specified a category.
On upload of an item, if you specify a category in the XML but do not create a corresponding FTP Input Feed for that category, the item will not be loaded into yospaceCDS. If at a later date you define the missing category as a FTP Input Feed, the videos you uploaded previously (but appeared to be lost) will be automatically uploaded into yospaceCDS. This applies to the previous 15 videos of this category, anything older will have been lost.

Accessing and Operating the FTP Account

Access

The yospaceCDS FTP can be accessed at ftp://cds1-ftp.yospace.com

Username and password will be case sensitive.

The FTP server supports both active and passive modes.

Upload your content and XML files to the root (/) directory of the FTP account. As soon as you log out of the FTP Account, yospaceCDS will examine the files you have left and put them in the library folder if they successfully parsed.

Files Left in Root Directory

Any XML file that was not successfully parsed will be left in the root directory, consequently, any media files left in the root directory will not have been uploaded into yospaceCDS (thus indicates a missing or badly formed XML file).

If an XML file references a media file that has not been uploaded (or is incorrectly named), then this will cause your FTP Input Feed to appear Red in the Manage Inputs status screen.

Maximum Number of Concurrent Sessions

The yospaceCDS FTP server will not allow more than 10 concurrent logins on a given FTP account. Some graphical FTP clients will open multiple FTP connections at once and in some circumstances may open more sessions than are permitted. Check the settings of your FTP client to see if this behaviour can be disabled or limited

Removing Items from the FTP Account

Once content has been successfully parsed, it will be placed into the FTP library for that account. The FTP library contains a subdirectory for each category you have uploaded into, plus a special subdirectory called default for uncategorised uploads.

For each published item there is are up to three files, a video file, an XML file and an optional thumbnail image (an image supplied by the upload process). If the thumbnail file is not uploaded, then yospaceCDS will create its own thumbnail.

You do not have permission to delete any files in the library other than the XML files. Deleting an XML file will result in its corresponding video and thumbnail file to be removed. Some moments later it will also disappear from the Content Groups into which the item was fed.

The following is an example of a FTP account structure:

/
- library
  - CATEGORY1
    - 3177.mpg
    - 3177.jpg
    - 3177.xml
    - 3137.mpg
    - 3137.jpg
    - 3137.xml
  - CATEGORY2
    - 3138.mpg
    - 3138.jpg
    - 3138.xml
  - default
    - 3139.mpg
    - 3139.jpg
    - 3139.xml
  - lastBuildDate.txt

Associating Metadata in FTP Input Feeds

Unlike RSS, the FTP protocol doesn't provide a standard means by which the content files are associated with useful metadata such as Title, Description, Publish Date, and so on. Therefore when ingesting content via FTP, it is necessary to also upload an associated XML file containing this additional information. Without it, yospaceCDS will not upload the content into the Content Group(s) you specify.

The format of the XML file depends on your choice of Feed Type. What is common across all types is the fact that you can upload an individual XML file for each video, or place multiple items in a single XML file. yospaceCDS will parse all uploaded files ending with .xml and look for XML fragments that match one of the XML Fragments described below depending on your choice of Feed Type

Default -- Standard yospaceCDS XML Format

For every item of video you want to ingest into yospaceCDS, there must be an XML file containing the following XML fragment (encoded in UTF-8):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ftpUploadItem>
  <uid>12345</uid>
  <title>Bail-out anxiety weighs on dollar</title>
  <description>Joe Schmo on the short- 
    and medium-term outlook of the dollar</description>
  <text>Joe Schmo talks to us about what he sees as the short-
    and medium-term outlook of the dollar</text>
  <publishDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2009 09:00:00 GMT</publishDate>
  <content mime-type="video/x-flv">12345_video.flv</content>
  <thumb>12345_thumb.jpg</thumb>
  <category>BUSINESS</category>
</ftpUploadItem>

uid: An id which needs to be unique for each video uploaded.
title: The title to associate with the video.
description: The description to associate with the video.
text: Text to accompany the video.
publishDate: The value here will be set as the Published On date (Output Feeds order on Published On date, most recent first). This should be in RFC 822 date format e.g. Thu, 12 Jan 2009 09:00:00 GMT
content: The filename of the content (video) that is being uploaded. The mime-type attribute should be set to be the correct MIME type for the content.
thumb: the filename of the associated thumbnail that is being uploaded. This tag can be omitted if no thumbnail is to be uploaded.
category: the category into which the content will be uploaded. Note that this needs to be exactly the same as any category value that you set when setting up the FTP Input Feed. If no categorisation is to be used then this tag can be omitted.

Type 1

Example syntax:

<CMSFEED>
  <FEEDITEM TYPE="CLIP" MEDIA="VIDEO" ID="DV250908PG1200" SORTORDER="100">
  <TITLE>Sep 25: Bail-out anxiety weighs on dollar</TITLE>
  <DESCRIPTION>Peter Garnham on the dollar's short and
     medium term outlook</DESCRIPTION>
  <VALIDTIME TZ="ET" >Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:57:12 GMT</VALIDTIME>
  <IMAGE USE="SMALLTHUMB">DV250908PG.jpg</IMAGE>
  <STREAM FORMAT="FLV" BITRATE="1200">DV250908PG_1200.flv</STREAM>   
  <KEYWORDS>Daniel Garrahan , DV250908PG.flv ,</KEYWORDS>
  </FEEDITEM>
</CMSFEED>

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