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Intelligent Media Services:Overview

Last Updated:Oct 17, 2024

Before you use the media processing or online editing feature, you must upload multiple types of media assets such as videos, audio files, images, and auxiliary media assets to the Intelligent Media Services (IMS) system. This topic describes how to upload media assets to IMS and the file formats supported by IMS.

Supported file formats

IMS allows you to upload videos, audio files, images, and other auxiliary media assets including subtitle files and font files. These files can be local files or online files. You can upload files to IMS by using the URLs of the files or by using the Object Storage Service (OSS) import method. The following table describes the supported file types and formats.

Media type

File format

Video

MPEG

MP4, TS, 3GP, MPG, MPEG, MPE, DAT, VOB, and ASF

AVI

AVI

Windows Media Video

WMV and ASF

Flash Video

FLV and F4V

Real Video

RM and RMVB

QuickTime

MOV

Matroska

MKV

HTTP-Live-Streaming (HLS)

M3U8. The standard M3U8 format is supported. Make sure that the segments of an M3U8 file are TS segments. We recommend that you use an English file name without special characters. This ensures that the file can be identified.

Other formats

DV, GIF, M2T, M4V, MJ2, MJPEG, MTS, OGG, QT, SWF, and WebM

Audio

MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, RA, M4A, FLAC, APE, AC3, AMR, CAF, and ACM

Image

GIF, WebP, PNG, JPG, JPEG, and HEIC

Auxiliary media asset

Subtitle

SRT, VTT, and ASS

Font

TTF, TTC, and FON

Upload methods

Upload method

Description

Scenario

Upload by using the IMS console

The IMS console is a quick and convenient method to upload media assets.

Scenarios in which you want to quickly upload files or upload large files.

Upload by using URLs

You can call the UploadMediaByURL operation to pull media assets by using the URLs that can be accessed over the Internet and upload the media assets to a storage address of IMS.

Scenarios in which you want to upload files that are not stored on your on-premises servers or devices. You can upload such files by using the URLs that can be accessed over the Internet.

Upload by calling API operations of OSS (not recommended)

You can call the CreateUploadMedia operation to obtain upload URLs and upload credentials of media assets and then call API operations of OSS to upload media assets. We recommend that you do not use this upload method due to its low upload efficiency and high error probability.

  • Scenarios in which you require automatic upload or you want to upload a large number of video files.

  • Scenarios in which you want to upload online media assets.

Note

If you upload media assets by using the IMS console, media tags and video thumbnails cannot be set. This limit is not applied to other upload methods.

Storage addresses

IMS allows you to store media assets in Alibaba Cloud ApsaraVideo VOD or OSS. For more information about how to add or change the default storage address, see Configure storage addresses.

Storage address type

Description

ApsaraVideo VOD

You can add ApsaraVideo VOD buckets or your own OSS buckets that have been added to ApsaraVideo VOD. If no buckets are available, you can create buckets in the ApsaraVideo VOD console. ApsaraVideo VOD allocates a storage address for each storage region. After you activate ApsaraVideo VOD, you must enable storage addresses before you use them. For more information, see Manage storage buckets.

OSS

You can add OSS buckets. If no buckets are available, you can create buckets in the OSS console. For more information, see Create buckets.

Media processing

If you want to process or transcode an audio or video file after the file is uploaded, you can select Media Processing after Upload on the Upload Audio/Video page. After the file is uploaded, IMS automatically executes the specified workflow to complete the transcoding task. You can determine whether an uploaded media asset is ready based on the received callback.

  • If a media asset is not processed after it is uploaded, you can determine whether the media asset is ready based on the callback that indicates video upload is complete.

  • If a media asset is processed after it is uploaded, you can determine whether the media asset is ready based on the callback that indicates a transcoding subtask is complete or a main transcoding task is complete.

For more information about event notifications, see Overview.

Contact us

If you have questions or want to obtain technical support, join the DingTalk group for IMS (ID: 48335001108) to contact us.