Installation

Launching an instance of open-videocore on Open Source Cloud (OSC). No servers to provision by hand — an MCP-connected agent runs the calls for you.

1. Get an OSC account and access token

   Create an account at osaas.io, then generate a Personal Access Token at app.osaas.io/settings. You'll use this token to authenticate both the deploy agent and, later, the API itself.

2. Connect an agent to OSC over MCP

   OSC exposes an MCP server that provisions and manages every resource open-videocore needs. Connect your agent to it:

   Claude Code / Claude Desktop

   claude mcp add --transport http osc https://mcp.osaas.io/mcp

   For any other MCP-compatible tool, add https://mcp.osaas.io/mcp as a server with your Personal Access Token as the Bearer token. Full setup guides at osaas.io/mcp.

3. Set up a parameter store

   open-videocore tracks the OSC service instances it provisions in a parameter store. Ask your agent:

   Prompt

   Set up an app-config parameter store called `ovcconfig` for my open-videocore deployment.

   The agent provisions the store and returns a config API key — keep it, you'll pass it to the deploy step next.

4. Deploy the instance

   Ask your agent to create the instance, wired to the parameter store from the previous step:

   Prompt

   Create a Personal Access Token for the open-videocore instance, then create an
   open-videocore instance called `ovctest`. Connect it to the parameter store
   named `ovcconfig` using the API key from the previous step. Use the Personal
   Access Token as the OSC access token. Generate strong passwords for
   `MinioRootPassword` and `CouchdbAdminPassword`.

   The agent provisions the instance and returns its public URL — that's https://<your-instance> in every example in this documentation.

5. Provision a workspace stack

   One call stands up the backing infrastructure for a workspace — object storage, metadata store, and queue. The transcoder and packager are provisioned separately, on demand, the first time they're actually used — see Operating a workspace.

   Request

   curl -X POST https://<your-instance>/api/v1/provision \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"name": "mystack"}'

   Provisioning is asynchronous. Poll the returned operationId until status reaches "done":

   curl https://<your-instance>/api/v1/provision/operations/<operationId>

   By default the stack provisions its own object storage and buckets — no storage configuration required. To point at an existing S3-compatible bucket instead, pass the optional sourceStorage / packagedStorage blocks — see provision in the reference.

6. Bootstrap transcoding profiles

   Seed the profile store from the default transcoder test profiles:

   curl -X POST https://<your-instance>/api/v1/profiles/bootstrap

   Your instance is live. The ops dashboard is at https://<your-instance>/ui; interactive, always-current API docs are served at https://<your-instance>/api-docs. Continue to Ingesting media to get your first asset in.

Environment variables

On Open Source Cloud only the settings exposed by the service's deploy form are configurable — the required credentials above plus the optional ENCORE_* tuning knobs. The others are injected automatically by the deploy step or fixed by the platform, and can only be set directly when you run open-videocore yourself (self-hosted). The OSC-configurable column below marks which is which.