How to Mint a Video NFT

This is a good tutorial for someone who is minting NFTs for the first time. If you know how to use tokenURI to mint an NFT you can follow only Step 1 and use the nftMetadataUrl field as the tokenURI for your NFT. The URL is compatible with both ERC-721 and ERC-1155.

If you're building your own application for minting Video NFTs, check our Build a Video NFT app guide instead.

Step 1: Upload the Video and configure the metadata for your NFT

You can use the @livepeer/video-nft npm script to have a local file uploaded to Livepeer, exported to IPFS and then mint the NFT out of it. Alternatively, if you don't have node installed you can use this script (bash) which works in a similar way.

Start by getting a Livepeer API key to use from the tool: Get an API key

Then simply run npx @livepeer/video-nft . The CLI will ask you for any information it needs and in the end will give you a URL for a simple page for minting the NFT.

Some tips in case you use it often:

Install it in your system with npm install -g @livepeer/video-nft and then use it as video-nft <args>
Set the API key on the LP_API_KEY environment variable to avoid the prompt for it.
Send all required properties as CLI arguments and avoid all the other prompts (good for scripting).
- The filename can be passed as a single positional argument to the command;
- The asset name can be set via the --asset-name flag and;
- The NFT metadata can be specified on the --nft-metadata flag. It accepts either a raw JSON or a file with the metadata.

Example:

$ npx @livepeer/video-nft
Need to install the following packages:
  @livepeer/video-nft@0.1.3
Ok to proceed? (y) y
? Enter your Livepeer API key (learn more at http://bit.ly/lp-api-key): ********
****************************
Tip: You can set the LP_API_KEY environment variable to avoid this prompt.
? What file do you want to use? nasa25.mp4
You can also send the filename as an argument to this command.
? What name do you want to give to your NFT? NASA 25th bday
? Would you like to customize the NFT metadata? No
1. Requesting upload URL...
Pending asset with id=08266a15-ff67-4ce6-9b8c-dff485ff3825
2. Uploading file...
Waiting for import task completion... id=5412f48e-af58-4d1b-80a8-2ec818519ffe
 - progress: 35.3%
 - progress: 60.8%
 - progress: 92.30000000000001%
3. Starting export...
Created export task with id=b008532d-839b-4925-9833-094d2d6a1cc3
Waiting for export task completion... id=b008532d-839b-4925-9833-094d2d6a1cc3
 - progress: 99%
4. Export successful! Result:
{
  "videoFileCid": "QmcEZYeH2QxySWqHFcQbSovb43NGST4JaDBpeG1Tk4aXmA",
  "nftMetadataCid": "QmR2SaapDATg7q9vVG2NSaGbSE3KUBLfUN49Lb737HY88h",
  "videoFileUrl": "ipfs://QmcEZYeH2QxySWqHFcQbSovb43NGST4JaDBpeG1Tk4aXmA",
  "videoFileGatewayUrl": "https://ipfs.livepeer.com/ipfs/QmcEZYeH2QxySWqHFcQbSovb43NGST4JaDBpeG1Tk4aXmA",
  "nftMetadataUrl": "ipfs://QmR2SaapDATg7q9vVG2NSaGbSE3KUBLfUN49Lb737HY88h",
  "nftMetadataGatewayUrl": "https://ipfs.livepeer.com/ipfs/QmR2SaapDATg7q9vVG2NSaGbSE3KUBLfUN49Lb737HY88h"
}
5. Mint your NFT at:
https://livepeer.com/mint-nft?tokenUri=ipfs://QmR2SaapDATg7q9vVG2NSaGbSE3KUBLfUN49Lb737HY88h

💡 The nftMetadataUrl is what you need to remember for custom minting of the NFT.

The equivalent command avoiding all the prompts would be:

$ export LP_API_KEY=<your API key obtained from the Livepeer dashboard>
$ npx @livepeer/video-nft nasa25.mp4 --asset-name "NASA 25th bday" --nft-metadata '{"description":"NASA's commemorative video for their 25th birthday"'

Step 2a: Mint your NFT!

Livepeer provides pre-deployed ERC-721 contracts in the Polygon mainnet and testnet. If you are happy just using one of those, you can just follow the link printed in the end of the video-nft CLI.

You will be taken to a minimal UI where all you have to do is connect your MetaMask wallet (currently the only supported one) and click the Mint NFT button to get your NFT setup.

❗ If you are happy with the NFT minted in the page above you can stop here! Keep going if you are curious how to create custom ERC-721 contracts and/or having your own NFT minting app. You can reference the same exported files on IPFS for your custom NFTs, grabbed from the script output.

Step 2b: Install web3

In this tutorial, we'll be using Alchemy as the Eth service provider. This tutorial assumes you have already deployed an ERC721 contract, which you can do so by following this guide.

In your project home directory, run:

npm install @alch/alchemy-web3

Step 3: Create a mint-nft.js file

Inside your scripts directory, create an mint-nft.js file and add the following lines of code:

require('dotenv').config();
const API_URL = process.env.API_URL;
const { createAlchemyWeb3 } = require("@alch/alchemy-web3");
const web3 = createAlchemyWeb3(API_URL);

Step 4: Grab your contract ABI

The contract ABI (Application Binary Interface) is the interface to interact with our smart contract. Hardhat automatically generates an ABI for us and saves it in the MyNFT.json file. In order to use this we'll need to parse out the contents by adding the following lines of code to our mint-nft.js file:

const contract = require("../artifacts/contracts/MyNFT.sol/MyNFT.json");

If you want to see the ABI you can print it to your console:

console.log(JSON.stringify(contract.abi));

To run mint-nft.jsand see your ABI printed to the console navigate to your terminal and run:

node scripts/mint-nft.js

Step 5: Create an instance of your contract

Now, to interact with our contract, we need to create an instance of it in our code. To do so we'll need our contract address which we can get from the deployment or Etherscan by looking up the address you used to deploy the contract.

For this example, our contract address is 0xD6A8375E7A3BE7157f9bBD9D53348b39d75bEb3E

Next we will use the web3 contract method to create our contract using the ABI and address. In your mint-nft.js file, add the following:

const contractAddress = "0xD6A8375E7A3BE7157f9bBD9D53348b39d75bEb3E";
const nftContract = new web3.eth.Contract(contract.abi, contractAddress);

Step 6: Update the `.env` file

Now, in order to create and send transactions to the Ethereum chain, we'll use your public ethereum account address to get the account nonce (will explain below).

Add your public key to your .env file —if you completed part 1 of the tutorial, our .env file should now look like this:

API_URL = "https://eth-ropsten.alchemyapi.io/v2/your-api-key"
PRIVATE_KEY = "your-private-account-address"
PUBLIC_KEY = "your-public-account-address"

Step 7: Create your transaction

First, let's define a function called mintNFT(tokenData) and create our transaction by doing the following:

Grab your PRIVATE_KEY and PUBLIC_KEY from the .env file.
Next, we'll need to figure out the account nonce. The nonce specification is used to keep track of the number of transactions sent from your address— which we need for security purposes and to prevent replay attacks. To get the number of transactions sent from your address, we use getTransactionCount.
Finally we'll set up our transaction with the following info:
'from': PUBLIC_KEY : The origin of our transaction is our public address
'to': contractAddress : The contract we wish to interact with and send the transaction
'nonce': nonce : The account nonce with the number of transactions sent from our address
'gas': estimatedGas : The estimated gas needed to complete the transaction
'maxPriorityFeePerGas': estimatedFee: The estimated fee to bid per gas.
'data': nftContract.methods.mintNFT(PUBLIC_KEY, tokenURI).encodeABI() : The computation we wish to perform in this transaction— which in this case is minting an NFT

Your mint-nft.js file should look like this now:

require("dotenv").config();
const API_URL = process.env.API_URL;
const PUBLIC_KEY = process.env.PUBLIC_KEY;
const PRIVATE_KEY = process.env.PRIVATE_KEY;

const { createAlchemyWeb3 } = require("@alch/alchemy-web3");
const web3 = createAlchemyWeb3(API_URL);

const contract = require("../artifacts/contracts/MyNFT.sol/MyNFT.json");
const contractAddress = "0xD6A8375E7A3BE7157f9bBD9D53348b39d75bEb3E";
const nftContract = new web3.eth.Contract(contract.abi, contractAddress);

async function mintNFT(tokenURI) {
  const nonce = await web3.eth.getTransactionCount(PUBLIC_KEY, "latest"); //get latest nonce

  //the transaction
  const tx = {
    from: PUBLIC_KEY,
    to: contractAddress,
    nonce: nonce,
    gas: 500000,
    maxPriorityFeePerGas: 2999999987,
    data: nftContract.methods.mintNFT(PUBLIC_KEY, tokenURI).encodeABI(),
  };
}

Step 8: Sign the transaction

Now that we've created our transaction, we need to sign it in order to send it off. Here is where we'll use our private key.

web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction will give us the transaction hash, which we can use to make sure our transaction was mined and didn't get dropped by the network. You'll notice in the transaction signing section, we've added some error checking so we know if our transaction successfully went through.

require("dotenv").config();
const API_URL = process.env.API_URL;
const PUBLIC_KEY = process.env.PUBLIC_KEY;
const PRIVATE_KEY = process.env.PRIVATE_KEY;

const { createAlchemyWeb3 } = require("@alch/alchemy-web3");
const web3 = createAlchemyWeb3(API_URL);

const contract = require("../artifacts/contracts/MyNFT.sol/MyNFT.json");
const contractAddress = "0xD6A8375E7A3BE7157f9bBD9D53348b39d75bEb3E";
const nftContract = new web3.eth.Contract(contract.abi, contractAddress);

async function mintNFT(tokenURI) {
  const nonce = await web3.eth.getTransactionCount(PUBLIC_KEY, "latest"); //get latest nonce

  //the transaction
  const tx = {
    from: PUBLIC_KEY,
    to: contractAddress,
    nonce: nonce,
    gas: 500000,
    maxPriorityFeePerGas: 2999999987,
    data: nftContract.methods.mintNFT(PUBLIC_KEY, tokenURI).encodeABI(),
  };

  const signedTx = await web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction(tx, PRIVATE_KEY);
  const transactionReceipt = await web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(
    signedTx.rawTransaction
  );

  console.log(`Transaction receipt: ${JSON.stringify(transactionReceipt)}`);
}

Step 9: Call `mintNFT` and run `node scripts/mint-nft.js`

Remember the nfcMetadataUrl from uploading your uploaded to Livepeer? Now it's time to use it to mint our NFT.

Altogether, your code should look like this:

require("dotenv").config();
const API_URL = process.env.API_URL;
const PUBLIC_KEY = process.env.PUBLIC_KEY;
const PRIVATE_KEY = process.env.PRIVATE_KEY;

const { createAlchemyWeb3 } = require("@alch/alchemy-web3");
const web3 = createAlchemyWeb3(API_URL);

const contract = require("../artifacts/contracts/MyNFT.sol/MyNFT.json");
const contractAddress = "0xD6A8375E7A3BE7157f9bBD9D53348b39d75bEb3E";
const nftContract = new web3.eth.Contract(contract.abi, contractAddress);

async function mintNFT(tokenURI) {
  const nonce = await web3.eth.getTransactionCount(PUBLIC_KEY, "latest"); //get latest nonce

  //the transaction
  const tx = {
    from: PUBLIC_KEY,
    to: contractAddress,
    nonce: nonce,
    gas: 500000,
    maxPriorityFeePerGas: 2999999987,
    data: nftContract.methods.mintNFT(PUBLIC_KEY, tokenURI).encodeABI(),
  };

  const signedTx = await web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction(tx, PRIVATE_KEY);
  const transactionReceipt = await web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(
    signedTx.rawTransaction
  );

  console.log(`Transaction receipt: ${JSON.stringify(transactionReceipt)}`);
}

mintNFT("ipfs://QmTju7Q4iPbosYJfFvSdxcRkT4KPYCpem31Z6mGL979Kkg");

Now, run node scripts/mint-nft.js to deploy your NFT. After a couple of seconds, you should see a response like this in your terminal :

The hash of your transaction is: 0x13edd7e9f1349ac7a92ed187686afd7c48e211f28ac1041b700d9691cc816455
Check Alchemy's Mempool to view the status of your transaction!

Using the mint-nft.js you can mint as many NFT's as you want! Just be sure to pass in a new tokenURI describing the NFT's metadata --otherwise, you'll just end up making many identical NFTs with different IDs.

That's it! You have now minted your video NFT! You can take a look at the NFT on Etherscan through the contract address, or on OpenSea at https://testnets.opensea.io/assets/{contract_address}/{id}