Video Processing Behind the Scenes

User-created video clips are stored in Xbox Live Cloud, with uploading and processing occurring in the background. These background operations are described in the following sections:

Push to cloud

Upon completing the creation of clip, the console will notify the cloud service (Game Clips Metadata Service) that a clip is coming. At this notification time, the console provides all of the related metadata for that clip that it knows to the Game Clips Metadata Service so that background processes—such as providing a location for the upload back to the console and user quota calculations—can be performed. As soon as reasonably possible, the console will upload the game clips to the cloud service. This is only done when resources are available so that we don’t negatively affect multiplayer online play or other online activities in which the console users are engaged.

The title does not need to take action to push the clips to the cloud—the console will do it automatically, and then will delete the local copy of the clip. All clips always eventually go to the cloud—there is no permanent local storage.

Video clips are uploaded in small blocks, which are re-assembled into a complete video in the cloud. The console tells the service the full size of the video and the number of blocks to expect up front.

Quota check

When the console notifies the cloud service (GameClips Metadata Service) that a game clip is coming, it checks the quota of the user for whom the console is uploading a clip. This is an internal quota known as the “FIFO quota.” The FIFO quota is for automatically-created developer-created game clips. These clips are deleted on a first-in, first-out basis once the user reaches the quota, so that the latest clips are always kept. If the user has reached his FIFO quota, the oldest clips will be deleted up to the amount of space needed for the incoming clip.

The FIFO quota is never displayed to the user; it’s for internal use only. Currently we expect it to be about 1.3 GB per user (about 30 minutes of video), but it may change based on storage costs.

Note

There is a second quota that will be displayed to the user; this is known as the P2P (Pin to Profile) quota. Users may flag videos to save to his profile and not be subject to the FIFO recycling. The user will have a specific amount of space, currently believed to be 2.6 GB (about one hour of video) for saving videos to his profile permanently. This is part of the Xbox One console experience. If the user reaches this quota, he will no longer be able to pin new videos to his profile without deleting one or more of the videos currently pinned, but he will still be able to generate new videos as part of the FIFO quota. The two cannot be combined in any way for additional permanent storage space or additional pin-to-profile storage.

Encoding for smooth streaming

The Game Clips Metadata Service will use Azure Media Services to encode the videos for smooth streaming. Videos will be encoded to the following profiles:

This is subject to change based on user experience in beta. All videos that are uploaded will be encoded to these profiles and be available for both IIS Smooth Streaming and HLS Smooth Streaming. The original video will also be available for progressive download if necessary.

Pre-release content

The Game Clips Metadata Service will store video content and metadata from pre-release titles; however, it will NOT encode them for Smooth Streaming. While our Content Isolation services can appropriately protect the pre-release content, we are not proxying the smooth streaming from Azure Media Services. This means, we give the direct URL to the smooth streaming asset to clients when they request it—and we do not check to see whether a user is authorized to get that content when they go to that URL. Therefore, we just won’t create the smooth streaming asset at all. The service contracts remain the same—the only difference is, for pre-release content the array of URIs to the video in its different formats will only contain the one URL to the progressive-download version of the video.