A number of customers have opened support cases regarding sftp file transfer errors and failures.

Most of the time the failure is due to file paths. When using sftp for input & output file locations in your job requests, the file path you specify must be the full, absolute path to the file, not a location relative to the home directory of the sftp user you connected as.

For example, if you connect to your server as user sftpuser, instead of a shorthand location like sftp://f1.vidfiles.com/output.flv, you must specify sftp://f1.vidfiles.com/home/sftpuser/outfile.flv

You do not need to do this for regular FTP. You case use relative paths with regular FTP.

We’ve added two handy elements to the API.

• pass-through allows your application to pass a string value through Flix Cloud and have it appear in the notification after the job is completed. This field can be used for anything you like, even an identifying string for authentication. This field is optional.
• notification-url enables a restful PUT back to your application based on the ID of your own record. For example, if you have a new UserUpload and a user_uploads resource, you can have the notifier PUT to http://mysite.com/user_uploads/2 or whatever the id of the new record happens to be. This field is optional. It will override the notification URL that is set in your Dashboard.

Feel free to clone them from our repo & submit back your improvements or fixes. Ruby gem is here, PHP is here. Python & ASP.NET coming soon.

There’s also a rudimentary HTML job request form (written by a Product Manager, not a programmer, so beware). Simply drop the sample into your Apache/PHP environment & configure a few variables for easy testing. It also includes a Flash player for playing videos from an Amazon CloudFront distribution.