Azure media player How to get the source url for the player - azure-media-services

Question

I have an azure media services account with some uploaded videos, but these videos only play on the browser with some additional parameters like these (?sv=2017-04-17&sr=c&sig=QMSr...) something like authentication keys.
I want a generic permanent progressive video URL that can be played anytime, I tried to use the azure media player with my video URLs with .ism/manifest and .mp4 but both couldn't be played
exp:
https://<MY_BLOBSTORAGE_ACCOUNT>.blob.core.windows.net/<Asset-ID>/Video_FILE_NAME>.ism/manifest
https://<MY_BLOBSTORAGE_ACCOUNT>.blob.core.windows.net/<Asset-ID>/<Video_FILE_NAME>_1280x720_AACAudio.mp4
I have tried the player from this official microsoft documentation:
http://amp.azure.net/libs/amp/latest/docs/index.html#full-setup-of-azure-media-player
Also note that the Azure Media Services V3 documentation & the community of the ams itself is very poor and weak in terms of explaining the steps for programmatically getting the video urls for the player.

Answer 1

With AMS v3, you will have to create a streaming locator, and you can use a prebuilt streaming policy. There are policies for
- streaming only
- streaming and download
- download only
With the download policy, you will get a URL for each blobs in the asset. For example :
https://myaccount-uswc.streaming.media.azure.net/1544fcae-a248-4f53-b653-cd02074b04b6/video_848x480_2200.mp4
With a streaming policy (recommended), you will get a DASH, HLS and Smooth URL like:
https://myaccount-uswc.streaming.media.azure.net/0eef6f88-47c6-4662-9111-60305d7c1000/video.ism/manifest(format=mpd-time-csf).mpd

Answer 2

It appears that you're mixing progressive download and streaming. I wrote a blog post on the differences as it relates to Azure Media Services at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/randomnumber/2016/03/23/progressive-download-and-streaming-differences-with-azure-media-services/. If you encoded the video into an adaptive bitrate MP4 set then more than likely you'll want to stream the video instead of using progressive download on a single MP4. This might help with the streaming side: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/latest/dynamic-packaging-overview

Answer 3

I found the solution with help of a friend, after creating the streaming locator, I have to make sure that the streaming endpoint is running and then get build URLs by looping over paths which I need to get using StreamingLocators.ListPathsAsync, below is the code snippet.
private async Task<StreamingLocator> CreateStreamingLocatorAsync(
IAzureMediaServicesClient client,
string resourceGroup,
string accountName,
string assetName,
string locatorName)
{
StreamingLocator locator = await client.StreamingLocators.CreateAsync(
resourceGroup,
accountName,
locatorName,
new StreamingLocator
{
AssetName = assetName,
StreamingPolicyName = PredefinedStreamingPolicy.ClearStreamingOnly
});
return locator;
}
private async Task<IList<string>> GetStreamingUrlsAsync(
IAzureMediaServicesClient client,
string resourceGroupName,
string accountName,
String locatorName)
{
const string DefaultStreamingEndpointName = "default";
IList<string> streamingUrls = new List<string>();
StreamingEndpoint streamingEndpoint = await client.StreamingEndpoints.GetAsync(resourceGroupName, accountName, DefaultStreamingEndpointName);
if (streamingEndpoint != null)
{
if (streamingEndpoint.ResourceState != StreamingEndpointResourceState.Running)
{
await client.StreamingEndpoints.StartAsync(resourceGroupName, accountName, DefaultStreamingEndpointName);
}
}
ListPathsResponse paths = await client.StreamingLocators.ListPathsAsync(resourceGroupName, accountName, locatorName);
foreach (StreamingPath path in paths.StreamingPaths)
{
UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder();
uriBuilder.Scheme = "https";
uriBuilder.Host = streamingEndpoint.HostName;
uriBuilder.Path = path.Paths[0];
streamingUrls.Add(uriBuilder.ToString());
}
return streamingUrls;
}
and in my service method I do the below:
StreamingLocator locator = await CreateStreamingLocatorAsync(client,
config.ResourceGroup, config.AccountName, outputAsset.Name, locatorName);
IList<string> streamingUrls = await GetStreamingUrlsAsync(client, config.ResourceGroup, config.AccountName, locator.Name);
foreach (var url in streamingUrls)
{
urls.Add(url);
Console.WriteLine(url);
}
myModel.StreamingUrls = urls;