dsmith
18th January 2004, 23:10
A little idea was running through my head the other day, and I'm curious as to whether it's possible. My first thought was in relation to Matroska, but I suppose Real or WMV may be potentials as well since they allow placing links within their video streams.
Essentially, I would like a cross-referenceable video library. The example that brought this up was watching Good Eats. If you don't know, it's a show on the Food Network where the host, Alton Brown, explains the physical and chemical reasoning behind how and why we cook food the way we do. Because there are numerous cross-references to the terms and activities used throughout the show (say, creating an emulsion), I was considering what it would take to: capture the episodes and store them in an easily accessible manner (essentially, put them all on a hard drive since we don't have removable media large enough to store all the episodes); and create links between references within any given show and another show that defines it, or from any show that uses or defines a reference to all the other shows that also use it.
Nothing terribly new about the idea (it's what the WWW is, after all), but using it on something other than just web pages would be neat. It could also be done from an external database level that could bring up the episodes in question based on queries, but I'd prefer something integrated with the video. My question is simply: is such a thing possible with any of the current container formats? If not, how difficult would it be to implement? (mainly in reference to Matroska, since it's likely the only one of the formats I might be able to encourage such an implementation in)
General distribution would obviously be a bit difficult. If Good Eats has around 100 episodes (and I'm not really sure how many there are), that would normally be spread across 20 to 30 DVDs. Compressed down to 175 MB each (low to mid quality online distribution size) would still take a 4 DVD set. Any large library of information done this way would still be rather difficult to distribute. If it were downloadable incrementally (trying to access an episode you don't have would try to download it from some known server), that might make it slightly more manageable, but... that's getting into areas a bit removed from what I want to ask, so....
Can it be done?
--
David
Essentially, I would like a cross-referenceable video library. The example that brought this up was watching Good Eats. If you don't know, it's a show on the Food Network where the host, Alton Brown, explains the physical and chemical reasoning behind how and why we cook food the way we do. Because there are numerous cross-references to the terms and activities used throughout the show (say, creating an emulsion), I was considering what it would take to: capture the episodes and store them in an easily accessible manner (essentially, put them all on a hard drive since we don't have removable media large enough to store all the episodes); and create links between references within any given show and another show that defines it, or from any show that uses or defines a reference to all the other shows that also use it.
Nothing terribly new about the idea (it's what the WWW is, after all), but using it on something other than just web pages would be neat. It could also be done from an external database level that could bring up the episodes in question based on queries, but I'd prefer something integrated with the video. My question is simply: is such a thing possible with any of the current container formats? If not, how difficult would it be to implement? (mainly in reference to Matroska, since it's likely the only one of the formats I might be able to encourage such an implementation in)
General distribution would obviously be a bit difficult. If Good Eats has around 100 episodes (and I'm not really sure how many there are), that would normally be spread across 20 to 30 DVDs. Compressed down to 175 MB each (low to mid quality online distribution size) would still take a 4 DVD set. Any large library of information done this way would still be rather difficult to distribute. If it were downloadable incrementally (trying to access an episode you don't have would try to download it from some known server), that might make it slightly more manageable, but... that's getting into areas a bit removed from what I want to ask, so....
Can it be done?
--
David