Trying to enable 2 /video/thumbs robots, but only one seem to be working.

Transloadit
1

Archived from the Transloadit support forum. Originally posted on February 8, 2012; details may be outdated, see our docs for current behavior. Original thread

My assembly: https://transloadit.com/templates/view/REDACTED

Looks like this:
{ “steps”: {

  "webm_encoding": {
    "use": ":original",
    "robot": "/video/encode",
    "preset": "webm"
  },
  "mp4_encoding": {
    "use": ":original",
    "robot": "/video/encode",
    "preset": "ipad-high"
  },
  "small":{
      "robot": "/video/thumbs",
      "count": 1,
      "width": 246,
      "height": 143
  },
  "preview":{
      "robot": "/video/thumbs",
      "count": 1,
      "width": 500,
      "height": 280
  },
  "export": {
    "use": [
      "webm_encoding", 
      "mp4_encoding", 
      "small", 
      "preview"],
    "robot": "/s3/store",
    "key": "REDACTED",
    "secret": "REDACTED",
    "bucket": "mp-video"
}

} }

For some reason when I test it out, it doesn’t do the ‘preview’ robot. Any suggestions as to why? Is it that I can only have 1 image robot?

2

Hey Kit,

no. By default a step takes the output of its previous step as the input.

The video/thumbs robot expects a video. Since you pass “small” (which is an image) into “preview”, the “preview” step does not do anything.

You need to add
“use”: “mp4_encoding” to your “preview” step and everything will work fine.

You can of course have as many robots of all kinds as you want.

Kind regards
Tim

3

OHH! The ‘use’ parameter makes a lot more sense to me now. Thanks for clarifying!

4

Np. Were the docs not helpful in this regard? Is there anything in the docs that needs changing for you to have understood this better?

5

I’ve been over the docs a few times, it makes perfect sense for me now though. I think I just had trouble internalizing it. Maybe a visual queue under an example showing the flow of the robots, something like:

:original -> /video/encode
               -> /video/encode -> /video/thumbs/
               -> /video/encode -> /s3/store

would’ve helped.

6

Alright, thanks for the feedback. I think we’ll introduce something like that.

Closing this ticket for now.