Before you can use the media processing or online editing features, you must upload media assets, such as videos, audio files, images, and auxiliary media assets, to Intelligent Media Services (IMS). This topic describes the methods for uploading media assets to IMS and lists the supported file formats.
Supported file formats
IMS supports uploading videos, audio files, images, and auxiliary media assets, such as captions and fonts. You can upload local files, or online files by pulling them from a URL or importing them from Object Storage Service (OSS). The supported file formats are listed below:
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 | Scenarios |
Quickly and easily upload media assets to IMS. | For quick uploads or for uploading large files in simple O&M environments. | |
Call the UploadMediaByURL operation to pull media files from public URLs and upload them to a storage address in IMS. | For uploading media files that are accessible through public URLs. | |
Upload using OSS APIs (Not recommended) | Call the CreateUploadMedia operation to obtain the upload URL and credentials for a media asset. Then, call a native OSS OpenAPI to complete the upload. This method is not recommended because of its limited upload efficiency and higher probability of errors. |
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When you upload media assets in the console, you cannot set media tags or video thumbnails. This limitation does not apply to other upload methods.
Storage address details
IMS supports storing media assets in Alibaba Cloud ApsaraVideo VOD or Object Storage Service (OSS). To add or modify the default storage address, see Configure storage addresses.
Product | ApsaraVideo VOD (Recommended) | Object Storage Service |
Description | You can add ApsaraVideo VOD system buckets or your own OSS buckets that are added to the ApsaraVideo VOD system. If no buckets are available, you can also create new buckets in the ApsaraVideo VOD console. For more information, see Manage VOD storage. | You can add Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets. If no buckets are available, you can also create new buckets in the OSS console. For more information, see Create buckets in the console. |
Scenarios | An all-in-one video service that covers upload, transcoding, distribution, and playback. It has built-in capabilities such as CDN, hotlink protection, watermarking, and AI processing. | General-purpose storage for unstructured data. You are required to integrate transcoding, CDN, players, and access control. This provides high flexibility but involves complex O&M. |
Price level | The unit price for Standard storage is comparable to that of OSS. | Billing items are more flexible. The overall cost can be reduced by 5% to 10%. |
Management and O&M | Out-of-the-box service. It automatically creates buckets, attaches a CDN, and generates playback URLs. The O&M requirements are low. | You must manually configure the CDN, hotlink protection, temporary credentials, and authentication logic. This option is suitable for teams with DevOps capabilities or an existing unified storage platform. |
Media processing details
When you upload audio or video files, you can select an option to automatically transcode them after the upload. If you select this option, IMS automatically runs the specified workflow to complete the transcoding job. You can determine whether the uploaded media asset is ready based on the callback that you receive:
If you do not process the media after upload, the asset is ready when you receive the video upload complete callback.
If you process the media after upload, the asset is ready when you receive the transcoding sub-task complete or transcoding main task complete callback.
For more information about event notifications, see Callback event overview.
Contact us
If you have questions or want to obtain technical support, join the DingTalk group for IMS (ID: 84650000851) to contact us.