Chris I¹ve a lot of recent experience with 16-byte UUIDs for identifying content (RFC 4122) and the slightly more media-savy 32-byte Unique Material Identification (UMID) from SMPTE (SMPTE 330M). Both standards are the basis for the Advanced Authoring Format, an industry standard used by video production tools from companies such as Avid and Quantel, and the related Material Exchange Format (MXF) used for production material interchange and now supported by a number of broadcast quality cameras, transcoders etc..
UUIDs are also known as GUIDs and are common to Microsoft Windows OS. Many unix OSs have a ³uuidgen² command to create UUIDs. Java has a ³java.util.UUID² class for generating and representing UUIDs. UUIDs are very well supported and have been the subject of some interesting security issues as without careful use they can expose your host ids outside your network. I am working on a media-specific Java API for AAF and MXF that includes support for UUIDs and UMIDs. Both can be generated at source and, as long as a consistent generation strategy is used, should be globally unique. Richard On 4/3/08 12:40, "Chris Sizemore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > anyone got any thoughts or experiences with the "UUID system for uniquely > identifying objects" mentioned below? in our collective opinion and > experience, is there anything like that, or close to that, in existence yet? -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] mobile +44 (0)7792 799930
