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 |
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. | |
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. |
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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.