We’re considering moving thousands of videos across from AWS to Stream, but I’d like to know if there is a better way of organising videos in Stream than simply lumping them all into a single area? There does not seem to be any kind of folder structure or tagging system in place for Stream to enable us to quickly find/organise/view a series of videos. Is there something I am missing or are there plans to introduce a folder system of some sort? The search function is good, but not better than a folder system.
You can definitely manage thousands of videos on Stream however it is important to understand that Stream is not a fully featured content management system (CMS). A content management system is a software might allow you to create, filter, sort, organize in folders and publish videos on a website. Stream stores, processes and streams the videos for you but it does not manage additional content or hierarchy related to the video.
Stream is best when used as a API for storing and streaming videos. There are two tools you can use to organize your videos on Stream:
meta key-value store: you can create any key-value pair to help you identify this video.
meta.name field: this is a special field that you can use the dashboard or API to search over
Stream expects that you use a separate system, typically a database, to manage your videos at scale. This can be the place where you could track the uid from Stream, along with author and title of the video and its folder structure.
I actually joined to ask this specific question. This seems like such an oversight. I also use Iplayer to host my preview videos and I am able to create playlists and folders for organizations. I run several websites, and I have thousands of videos, I’d rather not have them all lumped into one huge list for me to try and find. Also the search option in the videos list is laughable, is it that hard to make your file name searchable? Right now my option is to F3 and just tab through all the pages.
I would like to support the idea that I should be able to load videos to stream and at very least have a folder system for organizing. We need to load serveral thousand videos and a flat system is not adequate. The idea that using an API I don’t otherwise need to use is not a solution. This is probably a deal breaker for us, we’ll probably need to go elsewhere. It seems like such a modest requirement, I’m very surprised.
This may not help and is probably not the correct way to do it, but I am tagging my videos with a 4 digit prefix. I then remove that with code when playing and listing. Such as “TRVL Video 1” , “HOTL Video 2”. When called it just shows Video 1 and Video 2 but I can sort and channel different videos.