Introduction to Video Access URLs

This article describes the syntax of Video Access URLs embedded into yospaceCDS feeds.  yospaceCDS supports syntaxes for both web and mobile video giving you differing sets of controls that are specific for web and mobile delivery separately.  

As an application writer, you should know which syntax to use based on how you intend to deploy your application; whether it is an application for a device such as a mobile phone or whether it is web page based player written in Flash or HTML5.

In some cases, you may wish to distribute URLs to videos via email, SMS, social utilities where you don't know in advance whether it is going to be accessed by a device or a desktop browser.  For this use case, yospaceCDS provides the Universal Access Redirector service that allows you to define policies for both web and mobile URLs into a single unified URL.

How the different styles of Video Access URL are structured within yospaceCDS.

Why do I need to understand Video Access URLs?

If you intend to grab URLs from feeds generated by yospaceCDS, then you don't!

Understanding the syntax of a Video aAccess URL may be useful however, for those who wish to:

• Programmatically manipulate the URL to influence delivery parameters of a video, such as delivery protocol, encoding rate, frame size, etc. This may be needed if the client system has access to additional information about the user's context that may give rise to adjusting the delivery of the video. For example, a handset-based application that is able to detect WiFi versus mobile network coverage.
• To deliver the audio channel of an ingested video as audio-only streaming. 
• To use yospaceCDS as if it were an advanced Content Delivery Network (CDN).  Content is ingested into yospaceCDS using the MediaItem API (an unstructured format) rather than using the higher-level feed-based ingestion mechanisms. In this case, the client application doesn't need to use feeds, it can determine the URLs itself.

Some customers may prefer to use the GUID-mapping Access Proxy rather than the Access URL syntax described in this document. This derivative of the Access URL syntax is a convenient way of creating Access URLs from the GUIDs you specify on your input feeds. This is useful if you want to ingest content using the standard feeds-based mechanisms, but still wish to construct your own Access URLs.