video-info-examples

Video Info

The web has been incorporating multimedia into its pages ever since the release of the Mosaic web browser around 1993. In the late 1990s, video started to appear on the web. Even today (September 2007), it is difficult for a web browser to extract semantic information regarding video recordings from a web page. Information such as the director, title, comments regarding the video, popularity and permanent link location are readily available on the same web page that contains the link to the video file or the video player. The video-info exploratory discussion is an attempt to create a standard method of marking up metadata and information about one or more videos discussed on a web page. This may include short films, animation, television or movies.

The Problem

It is difficult for a browser to extract semantic information about video described on a web page. Metadata such as title, director, screen stills, description, duration, and categories provide relevant context for the video recording.

Having such information marked up can provide a number of benefits to the viewer. If a web browser understands that a particular web page contains a video created by a particular directory, it can produce richer interactions. For example, specific searches may be performed for directors and videos via general search services such as Google and Wikipedia. Specific search services may also be queried such as IMDB, The Internet Archive, or Bitmunk. Additionally, classification by crawlers can become more accurate. If there are 4 television episodes found on a page created by the same directory, and that content consumes a significant portion of the page, it can be assumed that the page is not only about television, but also about a particular director.

The video information need not be associated with a file. Note that video content (Sin City directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez) is different from the video file format (1.5Mbps MPEG-4 with 320Kbps stereo MP3 audio track). The goal of this discussion is to create a Microformat draft for marking up video metadata and information.

Authors

• Manu Sporny, Bitmunk - Digital Bazaar, Inc. (PI, editor)

Contributors

• RodBegbie
• Tantek Çelik
• Mary Hodder
• Joshua Kinberg
• ChrisMessina
• Lisa Rein

Existing Practices

Listed below is an overview of existing patterns and practices found in the wild for audio information and metadata.

Other schema

• MPEG4 - includes list of field names, for example "Genre", "Track number", "Disk number".

Other attempts to solve The Problem

• media-info-examples - Attempted to find an uber-microformat for describing media. Turned out to be too large of a task, thus the problem was split into attempting to create microformats for audio, video and images.