Thursday, June 16, 2016

Amazon Video Direct Part 2

So they finally got us a dashboard. It shows all of my movies, and some chart but it claims my movies aren't "published".

Not sure what that means. If I go search for my movies on Amazon, they're still there to stream.

I do some digging. I send an email when I can't find any answers.

And Amazon responds:
For migrated videos from CreateSpace, these videos will remain live on Amazon, even if you don't have Closed Caption files.

If you wish to submit changes for already existing content to be updated on Amazon by clicking "Publish," your video's will need to meet our Technical Specification requirements that can be found here:

https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=201973700

So my movies will stay as is unless I want any changes. And by changes, I assume that means if I want to now upload hi-def movies(which they never accepted before from us indie people). The downside is that I'll have to get subtitles created for each movie, which will be like $90-$120 depending on which movie.

And technically before I got that answer I was uploading the Bounty Subtitles--figured I'd publish it and see what happens. So I upload my subtitles and Amazon asks this--what's your movie? 23.976 drop frame, 23.976 non-drop frame, 24fps, 25fps, 29.97 drop frame or 29.97 non-drop frame.

I'm thinking--are you serious? I have no idea. I sent my movies in as dvds years ago(or uploaded an ISO). Why can't AMAZON look at the file and figure it out.

I take a guess and click Publish. Get a bullshit error:
Video assets: An error occurred while processing the captions/timed text file. This file won't successfully complete the encoding workflows. Please submit a new file

 Thanks for all that detail on what the error was. Technically it's an SRT file(which Amazon says is fine) and it was created by one of the companies Amazon recommends(though I got it done long before this).

So I go through and change it to different fps and keep trying to publish. I get the same error above. Pretty frustrating, so I gave up.

But if they accept it I can then get it on Amazon Prime if I feel like it. Won't be crap for money, but a lot of people haven't seen it who I think would want to see it.