Overview

What the convt API does, how a conversion works, and where to start.

The convt API converts files on convt’s servers. You send a file, pick a target format, and get the converted file back. It handles the same formats as the convt desktop app: images, video, audio, documents and PDFs.

Use the API when the conversion has to happen in your own product or pipeline. If you only need to convert files on your own machine, the desktop app and CLI do it locally, with no API key and no upload.

How a conversion works

Every conversion is a job. The API never receives your file in a request body. Your code uploads it straight to storage through a signed URL, which keeps large files off the API and lets uploads go up to 2 GB.

1. Create a job with the input format, the target format and the exact file size.
2. Upload the file with PUT to the upload_url in the response.
3. Start the job. convt checks the upload and queues it.
4. Poll the job until its status is succeeded, failed or cancelled.
5. Download the outputs from the signed URLs the API returns.

The Quick start runs all five steps in Node, cURL, a browser app and the CLI.

What you need

• A convt account with API billing. Subscribe on the API page of the dashboard, where you also set a spend cap for each billing period.
• A cvt_live_ API key from the same page. See Authentication.

Pricing

Each job that succeeds costs 1 cent. Failed and cancelled jobs cost nothing. Creating a job reserves 1 cent against your spend cap until it finishes, so the API refuses new jobs with limit_reached once your used and reserved spend reaches the cap.

Base URL

Next steps