Re: [backstage] If you had a ton of content to freely distribute
On 19/01/2009 18:36, Ian Forrester ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk wrote: Say, we had a ton of media assets from a BBC programme which we owned all the rights to and wanted to distribute widely. Not just video, but images, sound, subtitles, metadata about the programme scripts, etc. How would you 1. Package it? We were considering MXF - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MXF but it looks difficult and time consuming to build, however the BBC did help build it so we could get help. Matroska, Nut and QuickTime are also look worthy. The point of view of an MXF advocate ... MXF is widely used at the professional end and capable of your requirements ... and the reasons why it is not easy to engage with straight out of the box is the shopping list that kicked off the standard. For example, efficient bit streams for file exchange between broadcast kit was more of a priority than human-readable XML. Also, MXF understands video frames and interleaves all the content so you can watch or listen to the streams as they transfer ... no waiting to unpack the package after transfer only to find out if it is the right one. As it is a media-specific standard, you can represent edit decision lists and metadata from the material essence ... could be a great way to do collaborative editing? You can distribute the large source clips once and then transfer lightweight EDLs around. MXF is an open standard and free to implement. The downside ... you need specialist tooling/APIs to get at the content. I was surprised to find that no Java API existing for MXF and its sister standard AAF, so I'm in the process of writing one (in development). http://majapi.sourceforge.net/ More complete C-based APIs are available here ... http://aaf.sourceforge.net/ http://www.freemxf.org/ In addition, a new XML format is now defined for MXF metadata which could be used in a tar or zip container, sidestepping the need for quite so much specialist (though free) tooling. Cheers, Richard -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com rich...@portability4media.com mobile +44 (0)7792 799930 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] What would you love to see coming out of BBC Vision in the near future?
Hi Chris It¹s not the size or form of your ID that matters, it is what you do with it that counts ;-) For UUIDs, UMIDs or URLs, you need a common understanding of what happens to them in inevitable change. I think of one use for a URL as a reference to a location where content can be expected to change, such as a news service home page, whereas I consider a UUID is immutable, it refers to one item of content for ever. Create a new version of the content and you have to create a new ID. However, this is a way of thinking and true for most ID schemes ... it all depends on how you choose to manage your identifiers. My excursion into the world of AAF has taught me a lot about comprehensive techniques for structuring and managing IDs for, and relationships between, all kinds of different media material. Most of what AAF is about is structural metadata, how one thing relates to another in a package, along a timeline, encoded with a particular codec etc.. This allows you to trace relationships between content through its various authoring stages back to its original source, a kind of super edit decision list. Structural metadata can be enhanced with descriptive metadata, normally using a schema of your own choosing as there is limited agreement between organisations about what this should be. So to build and expose your EverythingBrainz, perhaps what is needed is an API for exploring structural relationships between items of content, perhaps based on UUIDs, and an API for searching on descriptive metadata (actors, locations, scripts, awards) that may return results including related UUIDs? These APIs could be WSDL or ReSTful in style. For example, I personally think the musicbrainz example should be a location where you find out information about ³Blur² ... http://musixbrainz.org/artist/blur Where an item is currently published is really an item of descriptive metadata. Every generation of the page should have its own ID within a content management system and the published URL refers to the currently published version. The API I propose would allow you to find out the ID of the currently published version and, with appropriate permissions, to explore previous versions of the page via ID relationships. UUID, URL, maiden name, doesn¹t matter as long as the relationships are consistent. In summary, I believe that you could use many different ID schemes and many different descriptive metadata schemas. The important things are: understanding relationships between IDs are how they managed over time; how to map between the ontologies of the various different descriptive schema. Within an organisation such as the BBC, maybe what is most important in the first instance is a common set of principles for managing and publishing IDs rather than a one size fits all system? Cheers, Richard On 4/3/08 23:17, Chris Sizemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: cool stuff richard. so how do/should we expose GUIDs to the outside world, in a sorta Web kind of way? cause it's not enough to just generate unique IDs internally, we also have to broadcast their, um, meaning to the world at large... in other words, seems like you need the ID, some metadata to describe the thing ID'd, and a publishing/broadcasting mechanism so that other people/systems know you have info to communicate. a la: http://musicbrainz.org/artist/ba853904-ae25-4ebb-89d6-c44cfbd71bd2.html sounds like the Web to me... and MusicBrainz, for instance, is an example of all of the above, no? but now, don't we need an EverythingBrainz (as a colleague of mine recently put it)? (BTW, i'm a person that feels that URLs, by definition, are GUIDs) best-- --cs -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Richard Cartwright Sent: Tue 3/4/2008 5:31 PM To: BBC Backstage Subject: Re: [backstage] What would you love to see coming out of BBC Vision in the near future? 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
Re: [backstage] What would you love to see coming out of BBC Vision in the near future?
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
Re: [backstage] BBC iPlayer bursts through user target
On 18/1/08 12:17, Steve Jolly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Graeme Mulvaney wrote: It would be good if you could provide 'bookmarks' into some of the current affairs/magazine style programming - e.g. you could jump to a particular report in 'the culture show' or skip to the sudden death round of 'the weakest link', etc. Segmented content, huh? Yes, that would be nice... :-) ... also known as micro-navigation of content. See the case studies at http://www.jummp.net/, an industry group trying to define standards to do just that. Not yet 100% popular with producers though, who would rather you watched everything in a programme that they carefully crafted as a complete unit! Richard -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] mobile +44 (0)7792 799930 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] flash streaming version of iplayer is live
On 13/12/07 16:24, Tom Cartwright [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Get back to work! Is iPlayer the BBC website killer? As Facebook is blocked in more and more workplaces due to the amount of time employees spend using it, will employees catching up with last nights TV at work cause bbc.co.uk to become a blocked site too? Richard -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] mobile +44 (0)7792 799930 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] BBC tech chief: You Freetards don't matter
On 6/11/07 18:29, vijay chopra [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I notice Ashley's misleading people again. From his blog-post: We do maximise the reach of our services by distributing our content via closed or prioprietary networks (Virgin Media, Sky, Tiscali TV/HomeChoice, mobile platforms, etc.) The BBC doesn't distribute programs via Sky, it distributes them via the Astra Satalite using the DRM free DVB-S standard; I don't have to get a sky subscription to view the BBCs digital satalite content, just a satalite dish and a decoder box. Similarly with Virgin Media IIRC the BBC signal can be picked up using any old DVB-C decoder. It's not encrypted in either case. I can't comment on the other platforms he lists, but if he's wrong about the first two why should I believe him about the others? Virgin Media and Sky are proprietary networks because a user requires a Sky or Virgin proprietary receiver to take full benefit of all of all of their services, not just video/audio. For example, EPG, channel list, interactive services, pay-per-view content etc.. The DVB parts of the network are open but a significant amount of the rest of the platform is closed. For the average user, this extra network data is important as, for example, they don¹t want to be typing in a transponder frequency just to change channel. In the case of the Sky network, Sky network-specific data is carried in the BBC transport stream that is up-linked via Astra alongside the open video and audio streams. The BBC distributes EPG data and interactive services to both Sky and Virgin according to the network¹s proprietary formats. To contrast this with an entirely open and non-proprietary network, look at the differences between Sky and Freeview (DVB-T). I believe Ashley Highfield is correct here because he uses the word ³network². Richard -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com
Re: [backstage] New TV Listing Design
On 10/10/07 19:24, Brian Butterworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But it could be done on analogue - you could never see the join in the switch to regional programmes on the BBC even back as far as Sixty Minutes, so it MUST be possible. On analogue Satellite? I don¹t think so. After all, the regional join works very well on digital terrestrial ... the same way as it did on analogue terrestrial. Why? Because a different video stream is fed to the coding and mux for the transmitter in each region. Regionality on terrestrial broadcasting is achieved through plain and simple video mixing at broadcast presentation. This form of regionality has the side effect that a viewer who lives on the wrong side of a hill near a region¹s border often gets the wrong region! In contrast, satellite transponders cover the whole of the UK different ball game to your ³Sixty Minutes² scenario. In general, a set-top-box is not video mixing hardware and the DVB broadcasting standards are not designed to synchronise frame-accurate edits between streams ... especially streams on different transponders that require a frequency change when you only have one tuner! If the MPEG-2 streams collapse, the opportunistic data on the interactive systems could claim all the spare bandwidth automatically You can¹t run an interactive service with that kind of interrupted bandwidth ... ³we interrupt this match at Wimbledon because Scotland and London have some regional programming now². Automatic opportunistic insertion of data for interactive services is technically hard to do, but even harder is finding an editorial requirement for an interactive service with random holes punched through the middle of its bandwidth. What is far more realistic is the possibility to download programmes and data to a PVR using spare broadcast capacity, perhaps combined with the delivery of ultra local programming via a broadband link. These pushed PVR programmes could be SD, HD, interactive features (like DVD extras), games etc.. Richard -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] mobile +44 (0)7792 799930
