Export of textual information from AVI tags

Kibi · Post by **Kibi** » 2003-08-06 12:15:00

I want to ask you to include support of
extended INFO tags into Ant Movie Catalog.

I'm author of abcAVI Tag Editor - the utility for adding, browsing and
changing textual info inside AVI files. In short abcAVI allows user to
download information on movie from Internet Movie Database or type it
by himself/herself and save that info inside AVI.

abcAVI Tag Editor has 1.5 years history and it's possible to estimate
approximately several tens of thousands users who downloaded abcAVI.
They are users who may or already use your software too. That's why I
decide to send you this mail.

Tags is pretty comfortable way to hold information on digital movie.
It's comfortable for users - no need to provide additional files with
AVI. It's comfortable for programmers - Extended INFO tags introduce
effective means to sign AVI files, keep and access information in
computer-friendly (database oriented) form. It means that instead of
one piece of information you can use a lot of different fields (it
allows you to perform sorting, filtering etc data with eases). And you
shouldn't parse the information on export - all the fields are separate

. No scripts with their limitations.

Extended INFO tags are backward compatible with Microsoft's definition
of RIFF INFO tags. RIFF INFO is standard way to hold additional
information inside RIFF files, including AVI (DivX). I.e. when you
open AVI with INFO tags in Media Player, at least information on Author, Title
and Copyright will be displayed.

There are many tags in Microsoft definitions of RIFF format, you know
"Title", "Copyright", "Author", "Comments" and other. The difference
between Extended INFO Tags and RIFF INFO tags is new fields for
description video/movie specific information like actors/actresses,
editors, writers, producers, designers, certificates/rating and so on
(you can see in the attachments at Comparison table of INFO tags). In
short INFO tags for AVI are like ID3 tags for MP3 files.

You may include ability both to read tags and to write tags - it
depends on your software. IMHO the best choice in case of movie
manager - ability to export information from AVI to internal database.

You may code all the needed functions from
the beginning by yourself or use following sources or binaries:

AVITags DLL - COM DLL for reading/writing INFO tags written in Delphi 5.
It was published under GPL with open source.
MMAviInf - little INFO tags editor written in Microsoft Visual C++.
Also open source project.

P.S. The list of useful links:

DV Data in the AVI File Format (HTM)
- http://abcavi.da.ru/dv_data_avi.zip
Video For Windows Programmer's Guide (HLP)
- http://abcavi.da.ru/dk_doc.zip
Multimedia Registration Kit revision 3.0
- http://abcavi.da.ru/mdrk.zip
Microsoft Multimedia Standards Update, rev 2.0 (DOC)
- http://abcavi.da.ru/riff1.zip
Microsoft Multimedia Standards Update, rev 3.0 (PDF)
- http://abcavi.da.ru/riff2.zip
OpenDML AVI File Format Extensions (PDF)
- http://abcavi.da.ru/odml1.zip
The Microsoft Audio/Video Interleaved (AVI) file format (DOC)
- http://abcavi.da.ru/avi.zip

**************
AVITags DLL - http://abcavi.da.ru/avitagsdll.exe
AVITags DLL Source (Delphi 5) - http://abcavi.da.ru/atagssrc.zip
MMAviInf - http://abcavi.da.ru/mmaviinf.exe
MMAviInf Source (C++) - http://abcavi.da.ru/mmaviinf-src.zip

Post by **antp** » 2003-08-06 12:51:27

That may be interesting for a future version (maybe not 4.0 because I have already lots of things to do, but maybe later).
I'll probably use the DLL if it allows to do it easily

Thanks for the info

Post by **antp** » 2003-08-06 12:59:51

I see that you used GPL license for your DLL, usually LGPL is used for that.
Well, for me it is not a problem, since AMC 4 will be under GPL license

Kibi · Post by **Kibi** » 2003-08-07 09:10:45

antp wrote:I see that you used GPL license for your DLL, usually LGPL is used for that.
Well, for me it is not a problem, since AMC 4 will be under GPL license

If you have your own AVI parser (IMHO you do) then there is no need to use my DLL. Actually the programme should find chunk "INFO" and read desired fields such as "ICOP" - copyright information, "INAM" - title of the movie and so on. That's all.

At present time you have procedure for extraction technical information on AVI (bitrates, framerate...). I know it's necessary to find and parse "idx1" chunk if you want to calculate precise video bitrate of the AVI file. That's why most likely there is no difficulties to add some more code to AVI parsing procedure.

P.S. And at the other hand, my DLL is the first DLL I'd created. Therefore it's better just to see at source code and write your own code. It should work better - you'll be able to debug and manage all the parameters by yourself.

Post by **antp** » 2003-08-07 09:22:26

Kibi wrote: If you have your own AVI parser (IMHO you do) then there is no need to use my DLL. Actually the programme should find chunk "INFO" and read desired fields such as "ICOP" - copyright information, "INAM" - title of the movie and so on. That's all.

Ok, this may be better so

Kibi wrote:At present time you have procedure for extraction technical information on AVI (bitrates, framerate...). I know it's necessary to find and parse "idx1" chunk if you want to calculate precise video bitrate of the AVI file. That's why most likely there is no difficulties to add some more code to AVI parsing procedure.

For the moment I remove the audio size from the file size to find the video bitrate