Introduction to yospaceCDS as Transcoding and Archive Hub
This section describes:
- yospaceCDS
- What it can do as a Transcoding and Archiving Hub
- Why you should use it
- The basics of the transcoding and storage API
What is yospaceCDS
The Yospace Content Delivery System (CDS) is a combined video asset store, media processing and delivery solution. This document deals with how you can use its transcoding and archive facilities as part of your own application.
Why use yospaceCDS?
yospaceCDS overcomes a number of issues for distributing media content to a wide variety of clients (such as web browsers and mobile devices). It provides a single interface for all your media, and takes care of converting it into all the formats and screen resolutions that you want to support. The data is easy to manipulate, easy to monitor, and easy to retrieve.
Because it is easy to manipulate media content before making it available for download, yospaceCDS lets you protect content by watermarking it. You can easily splice clips together, for example to add a common title or ending sequence to videos. It detects attempts to upload existing data to prevent unauthorised use or plagiarism of existing content. Yospace supports both download (HTTP) and streaming (RTSP) of content. By default, content is available for anyone to download, provided they have the URL. However, it's easy to restrict access to any content to authorised users only. The Device Targeting System (DTS) automatically delivers the best format for a user's device by dynamically considering things like bandwidth, screen size, and the supported formats.
Functional Overview
yospaceCDS provides a way of storing and distributing media content (image, video, or audio). You put media content in, and can subsequently take it out in a wide range of formats perhaps with modifications such as added intros or logos. The CDS takes care of the format conversions, caching, and data management. The key feature is that you only need to provide the media content once. Then you either specify the conversions you want applied, or let the DTS automatically do that for you. yospaceCDS processes the content (such as converting formats or adding image features), and makes the results of all those conversions available for download (or streaming) via a simple, unique URL.
Web Services API
yospaceCDS operates with a Web Services interface so it is easy to integrate into a wide range of applications. The full interface specification is available in WSDL. Content is uploaded and manipulated through HTTP(S) requests. yospaceCDS itself sends notifications to report the status of operations (typically confirming that content is now available for download). Ultimately the content itself, processed and stored in the media farm, is available for download or streaming using a simple URL.
You must explicitly indicate the conversions required to the content you upload (either you do this yourself, or you let the Device Targeting System (DTS) take care of it for you). Standard conversions include all the common media formats (so that a video submitted in one format is available in a range of others), but may also include filters such as thumbnailing, watermarking or splicing videos together. In addition to the standard conversions, yospaceCDS can also run third-party conversion scripts.
All content stored in yospaceCDS can be retrieved by a URL that uniquely identifies the content and the conversions that have been applied to it (for example, the format conversion).
Restricted Access
Not everything in yospaceCDS is freely available for download or streaming. You can restrict any of the content so that it can only be accessed by authorised users. A typical example of this is content that is only available to a customer who has paid for it. For example, yospaceCDS can be configured to recognise an encrypted token, with a limited lifespan, which your purchasing mechanism can generate when the customer pays for the content.
The original, or canonical, data is never made available. This ensures, for example, that video that has been watermarked with the publisher’s logo cannot be downloaded without it.
The Upload Retrieval Process
The diagram shows the basic process of uploading media content, converting it, and making it available for download or streaming. See A Simple Example for a description of each stage of this process. The subsequent sections describe each stage in detail.
