Publishing Media Content Items

The general process of publishing a content item in Content Studio involves pushing it through a series of states. When you first save a new content item, it is saved in the state draft. It can then be pushed through the states submitted (that is, submitted for approval), approved and published. A content item is only visible to users of your web site when it reaches the published state. Content Studio does not enforce the use of all these states - it is perfectly possible to skip submitted and approved, and move a content item straight from draft to published if you have sufficient access rights.

Publishing media content items is a rather more complex process than publishing text and image content items, because it is not just an administrative process - it also involves:

• Transcoding the video/audio content to a variety of formats and encodings for display/playback on different devices and platforms

• Copying the transcoded videos/audios to their published destinations (often an external content delivery network)

These processes are carried out by VME Online, and VME Online has its own set of states used to represent various stages in this process. Moving a content item from one state to the next in Content Studio actually initiates a VME Online process, and can cause the video/audio content item to move through a sequence of several VME Online states, which are reported back to Content Engine and displayed in a special Media Status section of the Content Studio attributes panel:

This section is only present in video/audio content item editors. It shows the current VME Online status of the video/audio, current transcoding group name and other progress-related information. There is a Compact/Details button that you can use to control the amount of information displayed.

The following table shows the sequence of Media Status messages corresponding to each Content Studio state, and describes the VME Online states the messages represent

none/none: no information about the video/audio has been sent to VME Online

Started/none: the VME Online transcoding process has not yet been started
Downloading/Downloading
Transcoding/Processing
Transcoded/Ready

Publishing/none: VME Online has been asked to publish the transcoded videos/audios but has not completed the operation and returned a new status
Published/Published

Published/Published

As with other content types, you can skip states and publish a draft content item without first moving it through the intermediate states (if you have sufficient access rights). If you do so, however, you will see that the content item in fact does pass through the intermediate states as the video/audio clip is processed by VME Online.

For video/audio content items there is no distinction between the states approved and published. If you move a content item to the approved state then it ends up published.

Content Studio state changes only trigger VME Online processes and state changes when you move the content item forward through the states. No VME Online activity is triggered if you unpublish a published content item by changing its state back to draft.

Two other Media Status messages you may see are:

Failed

This represents the VME Online status failed. It indicates that transcoding has failed.

Restarted

This means that VME Online has been asked to delete the previously transcoded video/audio clips and is transcoding a new clip.