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Assets in Azure Media Services v3

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Warning

Azure Media Services will be retired June 30th, 2024. For more information, see the AMS Retirement Guide.

In Azure Media Services, an Asset is a core concept. It is where you input media (for example, through upload or live ingest), output media (from a job output), and publish media (for streaming).

An Asset is mapped to a blob container in the Azure Storage account and the files in the Asset are stored as block blobs in that container. Assets contain information about digital files stored in Azure Storage (including video, audio, images, thumbnail collections, text tracks, and closed caption files).

Storage options

Media Services supports Blob tiers when the account uses General-purpose v2 (GPv2) storage. With GPv2, you can move files to Cool or Archive storage. Archive storage is suitable for archiving source files when no longer needed (for example, after they've been encoded).

The Archive storage tier is only recommended for very large source files that have already been encoded and the encoding Job output was put in an output blob container. The blobs in the output container that you want to associate with an Asset and use to stream or analyze your content must exist in a Hot or Cool storage tier.

Naming files/blobs within an asset

The names of files/blobs within an asset must follow both the blob name requirements and the NTFS name requirements. The reason for these requirements is the files can get copied from blob storage to a local NTFS disk for processing.

Reserved characters

  • Media Services uses the value of the asset file name when building URLs for streaming content. For this reason, percent-encoding is not allowed. The value of the name property cannot have any of the following percent-encoding-reserved characters: !*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]". Also, there can only be one '.' for the file name extension.
  • The length of the name should not be greater than 260 characters.

Asset How-Tos and Tutorials

Get help and support

You can contact Media Services with questions or follow our updates by one of the following methods: