A BIF is a small file that contains screen grabs from intervals in your video clip, that viewers can use to assist in scrubbing through the timeline. The storage control panel will generate a BIF for any clip with one click.
Similarly, ScaleEngine's BIF API endpoint provides Create, Read, Update and Delete functionality to automate BIF generation as part of your workflow.
You can request frame size and interval for the scrubbing detail you want, on creation or update, and a read request will return the url of the BIF.
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Here is a full clappr player example with thumbnail scrubbing using a BIF (base index frames) file. Note that these players are auto-generated in our control panel. Simply check the "bif" checkbox in the player generator, and it will load a BIF file if it exists.
The player loads and processes the BIF file, which is one file with many thumbnails concatenated together. The thumbnails are displayed along the seek bar in the player, and if you mouse over or manipulate your roku remote control it will show the thumbnail closest to that position in the video to give you an idea where you're going to seek to.
ScaleEngine's BIF API endpoint provides Create, Read, Update and Delete functionality. You can use our API to programatically generate BIF files for all of your VOD to your exact specifications.
You can request frame size and interval for the scrubbing detail you want, on creation or update, and a read request will return the url of the BIF, along with details for that BIF file.
Documentation for the BIF endpoint can be found in the control panel here: BIF documentation
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Our storage systems are located in one of our two Canadian data centres, and meet Canadian government requirements for physical server storage location and handling by a Canadian company.
All data is redundantly stored, and comes with rsync, unix shell, and ftp/sftp access to our storage. There are no restrictions on what you can store or upload. Backups and non-media type storage is available.
If you have specific storage needs, please Contact us, and we'll see what can be done to meet your reqirements.