Metadata for media files
A friend asked a question about metadata for media files. In my production workflow, I've been using ffmpeg for this task with simple bash scripts. here is an example:
ffmpeg -threads $THREADS $OVERWRITE -i $CLIPNAME
-metadata title="$TITLE"
-metadata copyright="$COPYRIGHT"
-metadata copyright-eng="$COPYRIGHT"
-metadata comment="$COMMENT"
-metadata comment-eng="$COMMENT"
-metadata author="$AUTHOR"
-metadata released="$RELEASED"
-metadata artist="$ARTIST"
-metadata composer="$ARTIST"
-metadata album_artist="$ARTIST"
-metadata show="$SHOW"
Going forward, how do you organize metadata? Well, I'm old school, so I put it in a structured relational database. I've built an app called Gighive that holds all your media files and includes a browser-based, searchable and sortable listing of all those media files with metadata attributions.
It is backed by a very slim MySQL database:
Gighive is cool, because of instead of having to know how to insert records into a database, Gighive has a very simple CSV file format that you can populate in order to upload your data. It has a limited set of fields, not all are required:
- t_title
- d_date
- t_description_x
- t_image
- d_crew_merged
- v_location
- v_rating
- v_jam summary
- v_pubDate
- v_explicit
- v_duration
- v_keywords
- d_merged_song_lists
- f_singles
A one-record sample of the file with the header looks like this:
sodo@pop-os:~/scripts/stormpigsCode/9_csvprep$ head -2 cleaned_stormpigs_database.csv
t_title,d_date,t_description_x,t_image,d_crew_merged,v_location,v_rating,v_jam summary,v_pubDate,v_explicit,v_duration,v_keywords,d_merged_song_lists,f_singles,l_loops
Oct 24,2002-10-24,,images/jam/20021024.jpg,"Ankhboy, Maximus, SRC, Snuffler, Stu, SweetP, TBonk, Trebor",,****,,,,,,"Flesh Machine, Fountain of Stillness, Getting Old, Hollow Body, Addict","StormPigs20021024_1_fleshmachine.mp4, StormPigs20021024_2_fountainofstillness.mp4, StormPigs20021024_3_gettingold.mp4, StormPigs20021024_4_hollowbody.mp4, StormPigs20021024_5_likeadrugaddict.mp4",
Once you populate the CSV and import it into Gighive, you can browse that searchable / sortable webpage.
You then upload the video and audio files into the directory on the Gighive server. Once you do this, you are ready to serve up some content to your friends, fans or family.
Also, the idea is that once you have your data in a structured format, you can then repurpose it to fill in gaps..like tagging your media with the information contained in the database.
Good stuff.
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