Two months ago we announced that basic quality assets were now more fully featured, with a wide range of functionality, previously only available in our plus video quality, now available — for free — on the basic quality level. For no up-front cost, you can ingest video into the Mux platform, with the full power of our Just-In-Time (JIT) encoding available at every quality level.
We also said there was more coming soon because we heard from you that some of the limitations of our basic quality tier mean you haven’t been able to take advantage of it.
The number one blocker we’ve heard about? MP4s. You need them for offline playback, for building content analysis systems, for short-form playback, moderation workflows, social embeds, and many other purposes.
Today, we’re making MP4 support available for basic assets, and we’re keeping our best-in-class JIT ingest, all for no up-front cost. For basic quality assets, you can create a video MP4 up to 1080p resolution, or an audio-only m4a for use cases where you don’t need the video. Or both!
MP4s on basic assets aren’t completely free, though: we will charge you a small monthly fee for storing them (and, as with all basic assets, there’s a 30-day minimum storage requirement), starting at $0.00075 per minute per month for 720p video MP4s. Like MP4s with plus and premium quality, each minute downloaded counts as a minute streamed and will be charged according to the video quality level. See the pricing page for full details.
Using MP4s on basic quality assets
To enable MP4s on your new basic quality assets, or to enable them on existing assets, simply follow the directions in our MP4 Support Guide, using the capped-1080p or audio-only options, or both — audio-only,capped-1080p (the deprecated standard option is not available for basic assets).
// POST /video/v1/assets
{
"input": "https://storage.googleapis.com/muxdemofiles/mux.mp4",
"playback_policy": [
"public"
],
"mp4_support": "capped-1080p",
"video_quality": "basic"
}Already created your basic assets? No worries — MP4s can be enabled retroactively on assets:
// PUT /video/v1/assets/{ASSET_ID}/mp4-support
{
"mp4_support": "capped-1080p"
}Be sure to check out the full MP4 guide for the full details on using MP4s with all types of assets.
What’s next?
We promised 2K and 4K support before, and while we haven’t launched that yet, it’s coming soon. Sign up to hear about that and other exciting news here.
Let us know what else you want to see for basic assets. It’s been exciting for us to see how, as we’ve added features, you’ve been able to use our basic quality level for more and more use cases, so let us know what else you’re missing, or what you’ve been able to do with these new features.
