Generating PBCore Instantiation data

Written by DaveRice on Monday, March 01, 2010

To follow up on the comments in Jack’s last post I posted XSL and workflow information that can translate the XML output of MediaInfo and turn it into a PBCore instantiation element (not the whole record, just the technical side of PBCore).

The XSL and a drag-and-drop Mac application of it are at http://www.avpreserve.com/pbcore-instantiationizer/.

An article about the development and related issues is at http://www.avpreserve.com/pbcore-instantiationizer/pbcore-instantiationizing/.

Overall transforming many of the metadata fields from MediaInfo’s output to PBCore is fairly straightforward (mediainfo:overallbitrate -> pbcore:formatdatarate, mediainfo:filesize -> pbcore:formatFileSize), but fields such as formatTracks and formatChannelConfigurations are a bit of a challenge to automate.

Any feedback on this is appreciated.

Dave Rice


Comments:

  • Kevin Reynen said on 03/08 at 06:13 PM

    It looks like mediainfo exposes a lot more information from codecs that support metadata in the file than ffmpeg’s -i.  It seems like a Drupal mediainfo module would be really helpful and could replace functions from http://drupal.org/project/getid3 and http://drupal.org/project/ffmpeg_wrapper.  Too bad it can’t replace EXIF as well.

  • Chris Beer said on 03/14 at 09:53 AM

    I’d also look at FITS <http://code.google.com/p/fits>. I’ve been slowly contributing some video-related stuff to them, and they’ve done some work standardizing the output from tools into a METS-based schema. While I doubt they’ve plugged VMD in there yet, it might make it easier to maintain a tool in the long run, and you’d get a METS -> PBCore XSL out of the bargain.

  • Jack Brighton said on 03/23 at 10:44 AM

    I’ve been thinking that a mediainfo Drupal module would be just the ticket for creating Instantiation metadata, but I’ll look at FITS too. Whatever it is, I think the aim should be for a producer who knows little to nothing about “metadata” to be very good at creating it.

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