[Azure] Media Service Node.js SDK and REST API

Azure Media Service is a great turn-key solution for your video-on-demand and live streaming needs. It’s has been well documented in the Azure official site, however, it’s still not much information talking about AMS Node.js SDK and the AMS REST API. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about it in this blog.

1.There’s no offical Node.js SDK yet

Now Azure Media Service provides the SDKs and tools below (abstract from official site):

• Media Services REST API
• One of the available client SDKs:
  • Azure Media Services SDK for .NET,
  • Azure SDK for Java, Azure PHP SDK,
  • Azure Media Services for Node.js (This is a non-Microsoft version of a Node.js SDK. It is maintained by a community and currently does not have a 100% coverage of the AMS APIs).
• Existing tools: Azure Classic Portal or Azure-Media-Services-Explorer.

Michelle’s Node project covers many of the functions, but it’s still missing some functions of Live Streaming. So if you need to use some live streaming functions, you can definitely leverage this.

2. How to make a successful call to AMS REST API using Node

There are many ways that you can test the API first, one of these is using POSTMAN. Note that you have to have an Azure subscription to do this.

You can follow this information to get your token back:

URL: https://wamsprodglobal001acs.accesscontrol.windows.net/v2/OAuth2-13

Method: POST

Headers:

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Host: wamsprodglobal001acs.accesscontrol.windows.net

Content-Length: 120

Expect: 100-continue

Connection: Keep-Alive

Accept: application/json

Body: (choose x-www-form-urlencoded, which means it will encode your parameters automatically)

grant_type: client_credentials

client_id: [YOUR_AMS_CLIENTID]

client_secret: [YOUR_AMS_CLIENTSECRETE]

scope: urn:WindowsAzureMediaServices

if you’ve done it successfully, you will get the response like below:

and then you can use this access_token to operate AMS REST API.

if you want to implement it in Node.js, here are some tips that will save you some time.

a. if you follow the guide above and provide your header and body accordingly you might still encounter this error

{“error”:”invalid_client”,”error_description”:”ACS50012: Authentication failed.rnTrace ID: 621b507f-d2f5-4fc6-b208-9bafc83aba68rnCorrelation ID: 67435ae3-3f3f-485a-b58d-85f28eabf2c9rnTimestamp: 2016-01-06 08:32:42Z”}

so what to do then?

please modify the headers and body as below, then you should be able to get your token back. 

Header:

‘accept’: ‘application/json;odata=verbose’,
‘Content-Type’: ‘application/json;odata=verbose’,
DataServiceVersion: ‘3.0’,
MaxDataServiceVersion: ‘3.0’,
‘x-ms-version’: ‘2.5’

Body:

scope: ‘urn:WindowsAzureMediaServices’,
grant_type: ‘client_credentials’,
client_id: ‘[YOUR_CLIENT_ID’,
client_secret: ‘[YOUR_CLIENT_SECRETE]’

3.APIs regarding live streaming

Please refer this document to operation Channels, and Programs…etc

I’ll find time to blog about this API.