Video upload

video create

Authenticate

Normal

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Doug Sillars

Tutorials

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api.video can help you simplify your video hosting and [delivery](https://api.video/streaming). As such, one of the first things you'll want to do is to upload videos and get them loaded into the service. Once you upload the video, we'll take care of transcoding the video into streams for delivery to your users.

The easiest way to upload videos into api.video is using our API, and we'll walk through the steps to use the API and get your video online in this tutorial.

## Using cURL

This tutorial uses curl and HTTP requests to authenticate your session, create a video, and then upload the video. 

This example works for smaller videos, but as your video gets larger, you will want to break the video into smaller bites (bytes?) to facilitate upload.  Here's how do to that using the [command line](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/video-upload-tutorial-large-videos). 

### Other languages?

We have many tutorials on video upload.  Here are a few links to help you:

* [JavaScript](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/uploading-large-files-with-javascript).
* [Python](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/upload-a-video-from-your-computer-with-the-api-video-api-python)
* [PHP](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/helpful-php-scripts-pt-2-upload-videos-from-an-ftp-server)

We have several [Clients](https://docs.api.video/docs) for additional platforms that will help you get started uploading videos quickly.

You can also check out the API reference documentation for uploading a video here: 
* [Create a video](https://docs.api.video/reference/post-video)
* [Upload a video](https://docs.api.video/reference/post_videos-videoid-source)

### Step 1
You need an access_token in order to create and upload a video.

You will need your API key to obtain the access_token. You can find your API key on [your dashboard](https://dashboard.api.video/register).

This tutorial uses the sandbox endpoint. To upload your video in production, simply replace all ```sandbox.api.video``` instances with ```ws.api.video```.

First, call the authentication endpoint and get your access token.

**Example - Curl Request**

### Step 2
We will use the create video API to create and upload the video.

The ```Authorization: Bearer``` header uses the access_token from the first step. Hint: Make sure to not remove the end ' when pasting in your token.
The ```title``` parameter is required, so you must add a name to your video.
If your video is hosted on a server, you can use ```"source":"url"``` in the JSON to add the video.
If your video is on your local machine, we'll need to do one additional step.

This example also includes the video description.
The response contains links to the video location, and generates a unique identifier ```videoId```.

**Curl Request**

This is a title

### Step 3: Upload the video file.

> In this step, we use the upload endpoint of the API.  You can also use [delegated tokens](https://docs.api.video/reference/videos-delegated-upload) for the upload. The advantage of delegated tokens is that these are safe to use on a webpage (whereas your authorisation token is not), and the videos are directly uploaded to api.video.  You can learn more about using [delegated tokens](https://api.video/blog/product-updates/video-access-management-how-to-create-deliver-and-manage-private-videos-and-what/) for this same experience.

In Step 2, we saw how to link to a video already hosted. If the video is not hosted, and must be uploaded, we will call the video upload API:

When the upload is complete, a JSON response similar to that of step 2 is returned.

That's it - if you access the assets links in the response JSON - you can begin sharing the video you just created. Note: The mp4 URL is only added to the API response once the mp4 video has been encoded, which may take a few additional seconds.

## Conclusion

In this post, we learned about authentication of our account with our [api.video](https://api.video) token, creating a video container, and uploading a video into that container. Once your video is uploaded, it is ready to be shared with your audience!

If you have any questions or suggestions, please share them on our [commmunity forum](https://community.api.video/). To start building now, singup for an api.video account [here](https://dashboard.api.video/register). Thanks for reading! 

Video upload with cURL

Some videos are large, and when creating and uploading a large video to api.video, there can be transport issues, causing the upload to fail.

When uploading large videos, they must be broken into 100MB chunks to ensure delivery.  While these also may fail, the amount of time lost is minimised, and the segement can be retried.

api.video will reassemble the video segments on the server, and create streams for your users to consume.  
 
NOTE: This tutorial walks through the process of partial video uploads using curl.  The api.video [API Clients](https://docs.api.video/docs) handle large video uploads automatically, allowing you to skip this process. While this is a great walkthrough of what the clients and SDKs do behind the scenes, we strongly reccomend that you use them, as getting the Content-Range headers correct (in step 4) is tricky.


This tutorial uses curl and HTTP requests to authenticate your session, create a video, and then upload the video.

Another great way to split up large files is to use JavaScript and Blob.slice. We have a [second tutorial](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/uploading-large-files-with-javascript) for that technique.

Due to limits in how HTTP handles large file uploads, there is an upload limit of 199 MiB per video segment.

However, you can still upload videos over 199 MiB, it just needs to be split into separate chunks (under 200 MiB), and each chunk uploaded separately.

This process works for videos that are less than 200 MiB as well, but has one additional step.


## Step 1

You need an access_token in order to create and upload a video.

You will need your API key to obtain the access_token.  You can find your API key on [your dashboard](https://dashboard.api.video/overview). 

This tutorial uses the sandbox endpoint. To upload your video in production, simply replace all `sandbox.api.video` instances with `ws.api.video`.

First, call the authentication endpoint and get your access token.


### Example - Curl Request

### Step 2 

1. We will use the [create](https://docs.api.video/reference/post-video) API to create a video container.
2. There are many parameters you can use when you create (and upload) a video, but the only required parameter is `title` (the name of your video).
3. The response contains links to the video location, and generates a unique identifier named `videoId`.

#### Curl Request

### Step 3 - Splitting the video
You have created a video container, but have not yet uploaded the video sources.  As mentioned, a video over 199 MiB must be split into smaller chunks.

#### Mac
split is a command line tool built into MacOS.  

1. The first argument is the chunk size (here 100MB)
2. The second argument is path to the source file
3. The third argument is a pattern name for the chunked files
 
This command creates 3 files:

#### Linux
You can use the split utility to split the video into smaller chunks (max 199 MiB).

1. The first argument is the chunk size (here 100MB)
2. The second argument is path to the source file
3. The third argument is a pattern name for the chunked files

This command generated 3 chunk files:

The last chunk is generally smaller than the other ones.

#### Windows
There are a number of free tools that can split a file into chunks.

### Step 4: Uploading video chunks

We will use the [source](https://docs.api.video/reference/videos-1#post_videos-videoid-source) API to add the source files.  Note that the url also contains the `videoId` parameter obtained in the json response from step 2.

To upload by range, you must add the following header to the request:

`Content-Range: bytes <from>-<to>/<total_size>`

- `from` is the **0-indexed** start position  in the file
- `to` is the **0-indexed** end position in the file
- `total_size` is the size of the source file. It must be identical across requests.


#### CURL requests


**Request/response 1:**

And there you go. Your large video should be uploaded and ready to go. If you have any questions or suggestions, please share them on our [community forum](https://community.api.video). You can [start building](https://dashboard.api.video/register) now!

Video upload (large videos) with cURL

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