Dynamic Streaming

Not everyone has the same bandwidth and a one bitrate fits all approach may not work for your clients. While our default bandwidth produces high quality video at a low bitrate it might not work for everyone which is why we have introduced Dynamic Streaming. This is a great way to offer the best possible quality and still allow the content to be accessible to a larger audience. After all you’ve created something amazing and don’t you want to share that with as many people as possible?

How the Dynamic Streaming works is by creating multiple profiles for each media item and switching between them depending on the bandwidth for that particular user. Someone with a high download speed will receive the best possible quality while another person with a lower speed will receive the best quality they can support.

Setting it up is actually quite simple to do. Just add the profiles you want to the media items you want to be dynamic. This will cause them to be retranscoded into various bitrates. The second thing you want to do is to go into the Flex Player Template you want to use to play the videos and click on the “Enable Dynamic Profiles” button under the “Delivery Config” section. Set the “Default Media Profile” to the bitrate you want to start at and lastly drag over the profiles in that same section from “Available Profiles” to “Associated Profiles”.  Now any of the media items with the profiles that are played with that template will be dynamic.

Upload Speed Issues

Upload and Download speeds have gotten considerably better over the last 5-10 years, but that doesn’t mean that slowdown doesn’t occur from time to time. We’ve built into our uploader some tools to help track down those problems when they arise. In the lower right hand corner you will see a button labeled “Log”. What that does is copy some debug information the uploader is recording to your clipboard. You won’t get confirmation that it has been done, but if you open up a text editor and select paste it will drop in all that information. When you are experiencing slowdown that you believe to be isolated to uploading files to your Unicorn Media account just click on that button and send an email into support@unicornmedia.com with that debug information pasted into the body.

Importing Thumbnails

We’ve had a lot of questions about the best way to import thumbnails into our system. We provide several avenues to accomplish this task.

Let’s say you want a scene from the video to be your thumbnail. Inside the media item, under the profiles section. you can preview all of the transcoded versions. Inside of the preview panel is a button to capture the thumbnail. This will take a screen capture of the frame when you click on the button and then bring you into our thumbnail editor to resize/crop the image the way you want it. You can also browse your computer inside the editor for an image to use instead.

If you have a player that is on the bigger side you may notice a little distortion if you are using the thumbnail as a stop screen. This is caused by the thumbnail being smaller than the player and stretching it to fit the screen. We currently have a feature planned to allow you to upload images of any size, but in the meantime we have a way to import them as is with no resizing to prevent stretching. If you import your items through an RSS feed you can add a thumbnail URL section to an item and when that item gets imported the image will get ingested as well into the image library.

Once a thumbnail is created or loaded, it will be available to use on any items in the catalog it was imported into and on the actual catalog itself.