Setting Up an Automatic Ingestion Folder on Dropbox

Introduction

Brightcove allows you to select a folder on the popular cloud storage platform Dropbox that we will automatically ingest videos from. Brightcove will monitor the folder, checking it about every 10 minutes, and automatically ingest new videos it finds using your default ingest profile.

A watched folder allows you to have users who can upload videos without having to go to Studio, and even if they don't have access to Studio. This is ideal if you need a UGC (user-generated content) solution.

Requirements

• You must have a Dropbox account.
• You must create a custom metadata field with these values:
  • Display Name: Ingestion GUID
  • Internal Name: ingestion_guid
  • Type: Text

Setting Up Dropbox

1. Login to Video Cloud Studio.
2. In the left navigation, click Integrations.

   

3. Click Dropbox.
4. There are two ways to connect your Dropbox account with the integrations module:
   1. Click Connect account.

   

   2. Click Connect account.

   

5. A dialog opens asking if you trust this developer. Click Continue.
6. Another dialog opens requesting permission to access your Dropbox account, click Allow.

   

7. Select the folder or folders where the videos you want to work on are located. Click Choose.

   

8. Configure your metadata settings and Click Connect folders.

   

9. The files are now synchronized with the Media module in inactive status. For more information about the behavior of the videos in the Media module, see Getting Started with the Media Module.

   

• How videos are shown in the media module:

  

Notes and limitations

• If this is a team Dropbox account, only individual and shared folders can be used. Team folders are currently not supported. Team folders are identified by the icon shown below:

  

  See Create a shared folder in a team account below.

• Currently, Brightcove will only ingest videos from the Dropbox folder. Everything in the folder will be ingested, so do not include any files that Brightcove should not have access to.

  If items other than video files are put in the folder, Brightcove will try to ingest them and those ingests will fail, but video objects will be created and show up in the Media module for these non-videos:

  

  These items can be safely deleted.

• Videos ingested from your Dropbox folder will be added as inactive. You will need to activate them in the Media module (or via the CMS API) before they will be playable. (If you are a Beacon customer, note that the videos will also need to activated before they will be synced to your Beacon account.) See Activating and Deactivating Videos for details on how to activate the videos.
• You need to create a folder specific to Brightcove only.
• For each Brightcove account, only one Dropbox folder is allowed for the connection.
• A Google drive folder can only be connected to one Brightcove account. You can connect different Dropbox folders to different Brightcove accounts.
• If you have (or add) a large number of videos to the folder, they will be ingested in batches of 50 until ingestion is complete. If you have one or two videos that you need to ingest immediately, you can add those using Studio or the Dynamic Ingest API, and those videos will be prioritized ahead of the ones in your folder.
• If you remove a video from the folder and later add it back (or add another video with the same file name), it will be ingested as a new video. You cannot replace an existing video by adding a new version to the folder.

Disconnecting a folder

If you wish to disconnect the folder, follow the steps below.

1. Go to the Integrations module and click on Dropbox.
2. Click on the email address of the connection creator:

   

3. The connected folder will appear - click on the three dots to the right of it and select Disconnect folder:

   

Disconnecting an account

To disconnect your Dropbox account, follow the steps below.

1. First disconnect the folder using the instructions in the previous section. Disconnecting the account will fail unless the folder is disconnected first.
2. Go to the Integrations module and click on Dropbox.
3. Click on the three dots to right of the email address of the user who connected the account and select Disconnect account:

   

Create shared folder in a team account

Creating a shared folder in a Dropbox team account can be somewhat tricky, as the option may not appear when you try to create a new folder. If that happens, follow the steps below.

1. Login to your Dropbox team account and click Create.
2. If you do not see the option to create a Shared Folder, click Shared in the left menu:

   

3. In the new screen that opens, you will see a button to create a shared folder:

   

4. After you create the folder, share it with any team members who will need to add videos to be ingested by Brightcove.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any of the next issues, please follow the corresponding troubleshooting process:

Unauthorized

This error is likely due to the third-party connection from your Dropbox account being removed; please try the next process:

1. Click 'Click here to reconnect.'
2. Grant permission to access your Dropbox account.
3. The error message should disappear in approximately five minutes.

Folder not found

This is likely caused by the folder being deleted; please try one of these options:

• Restore the folder on Dropbox with its original name; The error message should disappear after approximately five minutes.
• Remove the folder from Studio and repeat the connection process.