Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

XML for multimedia

Author:Jacob Savin
Posted:4/30/1999; 8:42:45 PM
Topic:XML for multimedia
Msg #:5498
Prev/Next:5497 / 5499

Hi, all...

I work at a company which makes, among other things, lots of different products for dealing with various kinds of multimedia content. We do high-end digital audio editing workstations for making CDs, DVD-audio discs and doing movie and TV post-production. We also make both high- and low-end DVD, VCD and SVCD authoring systems. I've been here for about 2-1/2 years, about half that time as a software tester and about half as a programmer.

Recently I had a conversation with our CEO, who's become interested in possible applications of XML in multi-media, especially as it applies to integrating multi-media authoring systems with internet based (as opposed to static disk-based) websites. This concept came up because he was hearing buzzings from multiple people about XML, while at the same time we are preparing to develop and launch a product that combines IE5, and a new ActiveX control for Microsoft's Media Player with our DVD authoring tools, allowing our customers to create DVD titles that interact with dynamic content living in websites out on the Internet.

The connection makes sense because the kind of interaction an end-user has with a DVD title is very similar to the one a user has with a website: you get some content presented to you (text or sound or still/motion images), and you make choices that lead you through different content areas, which due to the nature of both media formats, is heirarchical.

We've thought of a couple of possible applications for integrating DVD and the Internet: One could author a DVD disc with, say, a feature film on it, which if played on your set-top box would be just like any other DVD movie, but if put into your computer might bring you to a website with merchandise for sale (bonus for our customers), or extra info about the stars, or a chat room about the film, or a survey about what you think about the movie, etc. Another application along the e-commerce line would be, say, a clothing catalog with real-time, high-quality video of models showing the merchandise, and an e-commerce website where you make purchases. Yet another example might be an online Anatomy course, where the pictures and video of the body's anatomy would be on the DVD disc (it needs lots of bits), and the testing and progress tracking would happen through a remote website.

So... This is really just a ping. Is anyone using XML to represent content or meta-data for multi-media, other than for websites? If so, what kinds of data are you representing? What are the shortcomings of XML as it applies to your media? Are there multi-media applications besides web browsers out there that are parsing XML and doing useful things with the data? How might I solve the problem that the actual data streams (for high-quality audio and video) are huge, like on the order of 4 to 9 Gigabytes? Clearly I don't want to encode these into XML. I'm really just musing at the moment about developing a standard for representing navigational information for multiple media formats in XML.

Ideas?

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