[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] metadata conversion API

[Aurelien Jacobs]

Michael Niedermayer wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 02:13:51AM +0100, Aurelien Jacobs wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > There is one last and important issue I want to address with the new
> > metadata API.
> > Old API allowed client apps and muxers to get a few select well known
> > tags (title, author...). With the new API, there is no simple way to
> > do that, right now. For example, if you demux an ASF file, and want to
> > get the name of the album, av_metadata_get(..., "album", ...) won't
> > give you any results, because ASF stores this information in a tag
> > named "AlbumTitle". There are lots of examples with various demuxers,
> > even for simple common tags. This also prevent correct remuxing between
> > different containers.
> > 
> > One simple solution would be to force any demuxers to export their tags
> > respecting a well defined list of known common key names (for all tags
> > that have a corresponding common name). But this have issues which makes
> > this impractical. It looses information. The client app can't retrieve
> > the actual key names used in the original file. And this would prevent
> > lossless remuxing in the same container.
> > 
> > So I built up another solution. The principle is to allows (de)muxers
> > to associate a conversion table to a AVMetadata. This table describe
> > the correspondence between the native format key names and the generic
> > common key names. Then with this conversion table,
> > av_metadata_get(..., "album", ...) is able to get the native tag
> > corresponding the the generic "album" key. And a muxer is able to
> > convert a whole AVMetadata to it's own native format.
> > 
> > First patch implements this conversion table API.
> > Second patch just shows a simple example of usage of this API (yes
> > I know it duplicates the ff_asf_metadata_conv table and I don't
> > intend to apply it as is, it's only a simple incomplete and unclean
> > example for now).
> > 
> > Also note the the av_metadata_get_conv() function which may look useless
> > in this patch set, is in fact required for applications such as ffmpeg,
> > to "copy" the conv table from input format ctx to output format ctx.
> > 
> > And finally, here is a concrete example of what this API allows. A simple
> > stream copy of those Matroska tags:
> >   LEAD_PERFORMER: Tori Amos
> >   ALBUM: Under the Pink
> > generates the following ASF tags:
> >   AlbumArtist: Tori Amos
> >   AlbumTitle: Under the Pink
> 
> IMHO The correct way to implement such conversion table is
> by adding it to AVInputFormat & AVOutputFormat
> and adding a simple av_metadata_conv() that takes the input metadata and
> both tables to produce outpt metadata.
> Thi convertion, which is just a single line of code would be called by the
> user app.
> muxers would only store exactly the metadata tags given to them and demuxers
> would only read exactly the metadata tags, convertion would be entirely
> outside of them.

I've thought about this possibility too. But then, do you think we should also
add a conversion table to AVStream, AVChapter, etc... ?
We may need to have a conversion table to handle their metadata in a different
way than the main metadata...

Aurel