Em 20/11/2009, às 07:33, "Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escreveu:
It's just the question if there is a need to somehow standardize this. The more stuff that gets added, the more cluttered the Tracker attribute menu will get.
Objectively speaking, we'll always have the issue of target demographics, where to some a subset of the attributes will be completely useless while others will be crucial, and those will often have little overlap given two groups of users belonging to different interest areas.
As a tie-breaking heuristic, we could use the frequency of occurrence of a given property on a broad range of media files of a given type, the ease of automated extraction by a sniffing tool/daemon, and whether they're important enough to an audience that Haiku aspires to cater to. I hope you don't find these criteria biased ;)
Well, guess what. I believe I've hit jackpot ;DFirst, those attributes are crucial to a target demographic of Haiku users, namely digital video producers and editors, even amateur ones. We're carrying on the flag of the Media OS, after all. Not just the Desktop OS.
And, on the one hand, you have proposed attributes such as director and producer, but other than film and CD rips, it's actually *rare* for audio and video files have them. Let alone a cast. Unless the person behind the camera is an egotripper and believes his/her mad skillz with a hand camera filming Aunt Mary karaoke performance rival Orson Welles' ;)
On the other hand, two of those attributes I proposed (sampling, codec) are *guaranteed* to map to actual, fixed properties of digital media files, *always*. There's always going to be sampling and encoding, even in the RAW case! It's even trivial to retrieve them automatically given some clever sniffing daemon. Which doesn't make it any less important to have them directly on Tracker. In fact, Adobe has included asset management tools for the several later releases of their suites for this very reason.
Niche, yes, but we cater to that audience. See that I'm not arguing pro a quantization attribute for example, which even tends to vary on a per-frame basis on compressed media.
Regarding interlacing, as long the high end of "home video HD" is defined as 1080i, and as long as there's legacy, converted-from-analog video to be managed and edited, we'll have to deal with it. Its importance as an attribute stems from the fact that mixing up of the field ordering is hands down the biggest source of visual artifacts - not overdone compression!-, even on professional TV studios. We had a glaring example here in Brazil where the intro and closing scenes of a daily soap opera by the largest broadcaster in the country had stupid interlacing artifacts, leading to jumpy frames and jagged lines whenever there were horizontal movements. o_O'
And as a sidenote I feel that attributes that are too long and clumsy to display on Tracker proper (like the cast or lyrics) should be handled by the full text indexing UI.
Cheers, A.
