Zalando PDP video: silent, portrait, no text, AI quality bar

Zalando's partner guidelines require portrait PDP videos with no sound or written text, and say low-quality AI footage is not permitted. With Sume you can request a portrait clip from POST /v1/videos, confirm there is no audio track with Video inspect, and pull a thumbnail with Video frames.

The rules as summarized

Rules are as read on the Zalando Partner University page on 2026-10-03; they can change, so confirm each line before you submit.

Make it portrait

Sume's aspect ratios include 9:16, 2:3, 3:4 and others, and each model lists the subset it accepts in supported_aspect_ratios. If the Zalando ratio is long side divided by short side, 9:16 is about 1.78 and 2:3 is 1.5, both inside the range, while 3:4 is about 1.33, which is outside it. Confirm how Zalando defines the ratio, and check that your chosen model offers the ratio you need.

Make it silent

POST /v1/videos has a generate_audio field that defaults to the model's audio capability. Not every model can switch audio off: Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 always has native audio and rejects generate_audio: false. Read generate_audio in GET /v1/videos/models and pick a model that allows it.

Then verify the output rather than trusting the setting. Video inspect with frames: false returns probe facts, including probe.has_audio.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-inspect \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: pdp-check-001" \
  -d '{"video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/pdp.mp4", "frames": false}'

The thumbnail and the quality bar

Video frames extracts stills at times you name from one hosted clip, as durable image artifacts at source size. Pass at[] with a timestamp to pick a clean frame as the thumbnail. It is billed by its Modal compute.

The quality rule is the hard part. No setting guarantees that a clip is free of motion blur or anatomy errors. Look at the stills from Video inspect, reject clips with the defects Zalando lists, and regenerate with a shorter, simpler prompt. Keep a human check in the loop before upload.