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 in the network

The different stages in this process are represented by the content item's media status, which is displayed in a special Media Status section of the Content Studio attributes panel:

graphics/video_status_panel.png

This section is only present in video/audio content item editors. It shows the media status of the video/audio, the pipeline used to process it 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:

Content Studio state Media Status

Draft

Not Transcoded

Submitted

Started
Transcoding
Transcoded

Approved

Publishing
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.

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 transcoding/media publishing actions and media state changes when you move the content item forward through the states. No transcoding/media publishing actions are 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 status indicates that transcoding has failed.

Restarted

You may see this status if you change the cropping on an existing video or audio clip that is already published, and publish your changes. It means that the old transcoded clips have been deleted and a new set is being transcoded.