[ogg-dev] Contrinued work with Multimedia Metadata Format (M3F)

[Daniel Aleksandersen]

Hi again Ivo and the Xiph ogg-dev emailing list,

This email is meant to present two blockers for continued development of 
the XML based Multimedia Metadata Format (M3F) (MDMF page in the wiki). 
This format is intended to replace comments as a way of including 
descriptions of metadata contained in the Ogg container format. For 
instance title, production year, actors, producers, and so on for movies; 
and artist, musicians, labels, and so on for audio. As well as 
description relationship between multimedia files; for instance 
describing that an image is the albumart of a song. Basically it is 
intended to be way more including and extensible than comments.

However development stopped some months ago due to little interest, and 
that I did not have the time to continue working all on my on.

Bad news first: The problem with future development is that I do not like 
RCFs—I dislike them almost as much as $ man pages—and that I do not have 
the time to study technical aspects required to ‘put the format into 
action’. I cannot work out the following. so someone will have to step up 
and work out these two issues:
* How to include the meta document in the stream?
* How to uniquely identify resources (albumart, songs, subtitles, ...) in 
the stream? A note here: Albumart is often stored inside the encoded 
files them self (in FLAC at least). How to address those images from a 
URI for instance?

The the good news: I can continue the work I originally started: Working 
out how to describe various media resources in a format that is both 
including and can be expanded (as XML can) when needed.



A tiny note at the end: A better name is Multimedia Metadata Format, or 
M3F for short. (.m3f a ‘native file extension’ if it ever appears outside 
an Ogg container.). Multimedia Description and Metadata Format (MDMF) 
was...too technical.
-- 
Daniel Aleksandersen <aleksandersen+xiphlists at runbox.com>