Stream videos in five minutes

1Get an API Access Token

The Mux Video API uses a token key pair that consists of a Token ID and Token Secret for authentication. If you haven't already, generate a new Access Token in the Access Token settings of your Mux account dashboard.

You'll be presented with a form to create your new Access Token.

• Access Tokens belong to an Environment — a container for the various Access Tokens, Signing Keys, and assets that you'll come to add to Mux. For this guide, you can keep the Production environment selected.
• Access Tokens can have varying permissions to control what kinds of changes they have the ability to make. For this guide, your Access Token should have Mux Video Read and Write permissions.
• You can give your Access Token an internal-only name like "Onboarding" so you know where you've used it within your application.

Now, click the Generate token button.

You'll be presented with your new Access Token ID and Secret Key.

Once you have your new Access Token ID and Secret Key, you're ready to upload your first video.

2POST a video

Full API Reference

Videos stored in Mux are called assetsAPI. To create your first video asset, you need to send a POST request to the /assets endpointAPI and set the input value to the URL of a video file that's accessible online.

Here are a few demo videos you can use that are stored on common cloud storage services:

• Amazon S3: https://muxed.s3.amazonaws.com/leds.mp4
• Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=13ODlJ-Dxrd7aJ7jy6lsz3bwyVW-ncb3v
• Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l2sm1zyk6pydtosk3ovwo/get-started.mp4?rlkey=qjb34b0b7wgjbs5xj9vn4yevt&dl=0

To start making API requests to Mux, you might want to install one of our officially supported API SDKs. These are lightweight wrapper libraries that use your API credentials to make authenticated HTTP requests to the Mux API.

# mix.exs
def deps do
  [
    {:mux, "~> 1.8.0"}
  ]
end

curl https://api.mux.com/video/v1/assets \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  -d '{ "input": "{INPUT_URL}", "playback_policy": "public", "video_quality": "basic" }' \
  -u ${MUX_TOKEN_ID}:${MUX_TOKEN_SECRET}

The response will include an Asset ID and a Playback ID.

• Asset IDs are used to manage assets using api.mux.com (e.g. to read or delete an asset).
• Playback IDsAPI are used to stream an asset to a video player through stream.mux.com. You can add multiple playback IDs to an asset to create playback URLs with different viewing permissions, and you can delete playback IDs to remove access without deleting the asset.

{
  "data": {
    "status": "preparing",
    "playback_ids": [
      {
        "policy": "public",
        "id": "TXjw00EgPBPS6acv7gBUEJ14PEr5XNWOe"
      }
    ],
    "video_quality": "basic",
    "mp4_support": "none",
    "master_access": "none",
    "id": "01itgOBvgjAbES7Inwvu4kEBtsQ44HFL6",
    "created_at": "1607876845"
  }
}

3Wait for ready

Full API Reference

As soon as you make the POST request, Mux begins downloading and processing the video. For shorter files, this often takes just a few seconds. Very large files over poor connections may take a few minutes (or longer).

When the video is ready for playback, the asset status changes to ready. You should wait until the asset status is ready before you attempt to play the video.

The best way to be notified of asset status updates is via webhooks. Mux can send a webhook notification as soon as the asset is ready. See the webhooks guide for details.

If you can't use webhooks for some reason, you can manually poll the asset APIAPI to see asset status. Note that this only works at low volume. Try this example:

Try an example request

curl https://api.mux.com/video/v1/assets/{ASSET_ID} \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -u ${MUX_TOKEN_ID}:${MUX_TOKEN_SECRET}

Please don't poll this API more than once per second.

4Watch your Video

To play back an asset, create a playback URL using the PLAYBACK_ID you received when you created the asset.

https://stream.mux.com/{PLAYBACK_ID}.m3u8

Preview in a player

implementation 'com.google.android.exoplayer:exoplayer-hls:2.X.X'

// Create a player instance.
SimpleExoPlayer player = new SimpleExoPlayer.Builder(context).build();
// Set the media item to be played.
player.setMediaItem(MediaItem.fromUri("https://stream.mux.com/{PLAYBACK_ID}.m3u8"));
// Prepare the player.
player.prepare();

See the playback guide for more information about how to integrate with a video player.

Preview with stream.new

Stream.new is an open source project by Mux that allows you to add a video and get a shareable link to stream it.

Go to stream.new/v/{PLAYBACK_ID} to preview your video streaming. This URL is shareable and automatically generated using the video playback ID. Copy the link below and open it in a browser to view your video.

https://stream.new/v/{PLAYBACK_ID}

After you have everything working integrate Mux Data with your player for monitoring playback performance.

5Manage your Mux assets

After you have assets created in your Mux environment, you may find some of these other endpoints handy:

• Create an assetAPI
• List assetsAPI
• Retrieve an assetAPI
• Delete an assetAPI
• Retrieve asset input infoAPI
• Create asset playback IDAPI
• Retrieve asset playback IDAPI
• Delete asset playback IDAPI
• Update MP4 support on assetAPI
• Update master access on assetAPI
• Update asset trackAPI
• Delete an asset trackAPI

More Video methods and descriptions are available at the API DocsAPI.

6Video FAQs

Can I add multiple audio channels or tracks to my video?

On-demand video assets support multiple alternative audio tracks. Live streams only support a single audio track.

You may want your users to be able to select a language on the player and view a live stream showing the same video content but play different audio. One workaround would be first, ingest multiple streams with one in each language. Then add logic to the player to switch between different playback URLs and the complete stream when the user changes the language.

Next Steps