DVIDS (Digital Visual Information Distribution System)
planned Executive · Tier 2 · API · Department of Defense (Defense Media Activity / DWIA)
Official site (opens in a new tab) · All sources
What this source is
DoD's own distribution platform and public API for military media — 1.8M+ assets: unit/service news, still imagery with official captions and credit lines, video with official closed-caption transcripts, and unit publications. The Search API filters by branch, unit, type, and three date axes; the Asset API returns direct full-resolution download URLs, VIRIN identifiers, and structured credit. The pipeline's designated first multi-modal source.
Identity and registry record
- Registry id
dvids- Agency / parent organization
- Department of Defense (Defense Media Activity / DWIA)
- Branch
- executive
- Type
- API
- Status
- planned
- Tier
- 2
- URL (home)
- https://api.dvidshub.net/ (opens in a new tab)
- URL (index)
- https://api.dvidshub.net/docs/search_api (opens in a new tab)
- Registered
- 2026-07-28
- Registry notes
- Deep dive 2026-07-28 (docs/dvids-multimodal-research-2026-07-28.md): API docs, TOS ('free for commercial use'; discretionary quotas; cache-refresh duty), copyright policy (public domain unless indicated; no-endorsement rule; journalist credit requested; some assets contractor-licensed — per-asset status check required) all read. stable_id design: dvids:{type}:{id} (API's own permanent key); VIRIN stored as official cross-system identifier. Video posture: metadata+thumbnail+captions only, no A/V downloads. Supersedes six unavailable service entries. Before probing: API-key registration, plus adoption of the proposed policy amendments (media byte budget, video posture, caption/credit rules, asset_posture adapter decision). Probe questions: news body text, rate-limit headers, full-res without login, CDN URL stability, per-branch volume census. Naming: DMA now presents as DWIA (Department of War Information Activity) — rename in progress; API host stable.
How we ingest it
- Channel
- API
- Method
- Would delta-sync the Search API per branch (types news+image first; date-windowed under the depth-1000 pagination cap; a timestamp pass honors the TOS cache-refresh duty), then the Asset API for selected items, with a free registered key; items attributed to the originating unit/service per the aggregator rule.
- Request budget
- the agency class: at most 1,500 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)
- Politeness
- robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded
- Capture and hash
- captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)
Ingestion health
Not ingested: the registry status of this source is planned.
Ingestion statistics
These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.
Not ingested: the registry status of this source is planned. Ingestion statistics are measured for active sources only.
All time
No requests to api.dvidshub.net are recorded in the request log.
Last 30 days, day by day
No requests and no items were recorded in the last 30 days, so there is nothing to chart.