[okfn-discuss] open film metadata database

Sat Apr 15 11:31:23 UTC 2006

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 10:25:21AM +0100, Saul Albert wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 05:32:26PM +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> I dunno who might be interested in or able to do something like this
> though. There must be a huge pile of prior art. I reckon what's needed
> first is a research project to gather who the brains are in the area to
> find out what is really missing..

You're right about prior art in the broadcast space. Anecdotally and
totally unresearched here's some faded memories..

Back around 1998 I went to the huge annual broadcast show in
Amtsterdam and one of the exhibitors was showing a Hierachical Storage
Management system which was an impressive room sized robot carousel
for managing video archives. It had not only enormous hard disk cache
but every conceivable player VHS betamax dvd dat etc. The media were
stored in a huge carousel and when you requested a file through the
web interface it found the media, put it in thr right player digitised
it cached it and streamed it to you as mpeg2. There used to be one of
these monsters on the 20th floor of centre point linked wirelessly to
post production houses in Soho as offsite backup.

The relevant tech to this thread was a data entry and meta data system
which stored all of the shot information about each clip, including
transcripts in some cases. It was pretty well developed and interfaced
with the DVB systems used by broadcasters and even SNG feeds etc. I'm
not sure of the underlying data formats used then, but a quick search
in this area might be worth a go. This European Broadcast Union might
be a good place to start.

http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/metadata/overview.php

"If you have any question on metadata, please let us know:
evain at ebu.ch."

The other direction that might be worth a look is PVR land. The mythtv
users I know in Denmark are using some TV listing scrape or feed for
scheduling encoding.

chrs

~/julian