I am trying to get a list of videos from a videos library (site assets library) using REST. Below is my query:
var url = _spPageContextInfo.siteAbsoluteUrl + "/_api/web/lists/getByTitle('Videos')/items";
I have only one video in the list, but in the returned results, it's getting 5 results. Any idea what is wrong with my query, why is SharePoint seeing too many items?
Like Eric Alexander said above, SharePoint creates a smattering of other 'helper' content for the videos such as renditions and thumbnail images. If you're only retrieving mp4 files, then you can use ContentType/Name = 'Video'.
If you will be retrieving other video file types (such as .mov or .avi), then you will have to get more creative because those come back as 'Image' content types. At first glance, it looks like SharePoint always uses .png to create thumbnail images, so you could potentially filter out results with content type 'Image' and FileLeafRef or FileRef values ending with '.png'.
Full disclosure: I haven't tested that thoroughly so use at your own risk.
Below is my complete api query:
[site]/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Videos')/items?$select=ContentType/Name,Id,Title,FileLeafRef,FileRef,OData__SourceUrl,VideoSetExternalLink,Created,Created_x0020_Date,AlternateThumbnailUrl,EncodedAbsWebImgUrl,EncodedAbsThumbnailUrl,FileDirRef,LinkFilename&$expand=ContentType
I'm not sure exactly what the answer is, but I'm noticing that each video is a "Document set" of some sort and that in the returned json there are preview images and other items. Document sets are a kind of folder and the have a FileSystemObjectType of 1. The actual videos are not folders and have a type of 0. So at first I thought of $filter=FSObjType eq 0 (for whatever reason the returned property is the spelled out version, but you need to filter on the abbreviated version!). And that would kind of work if you don't have anything else in the asset library, but as soon as I added some images they also aren't folders.
So here is what I worked out
<site>/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('Videos')/items?$filter=ContentType eq 'Video Rendition'&$select=FileLeafRef,FileRef,ContentTypeId,ContentType/Name&$expand=ContentType
I don't actually have multiple renditions for my videos, so I don't know what happens in that case. I don't think SP automatically creates video renditions the same way it can create image renditions. I think that it just allows you to manually manage them.
Also you don't need the FileLeafRef and FileRef in the $select, but I figured you might be wanting to get the url for the videos...
