Metadata In Video?

Why is it, in today's world, a world full of so much metadata, Video seems to be left behind?

If one looks around at all the audio available, metadata, in the form of tagging, has become very much commonplace. Not only is most audio you find online well-tagged, but there are also a host of services aimed at auto-tagging, so when you rip that DVD, everything is perfectly tagged at the point of playback. This has become even more important with the rise of digital audio players, it has become all the more important to have tags to take the place of the oh-so-ineffective filesystem.

Is it because we are missing the tools to do the job? If one takes a look at the Matroska (Matroska, known to most as '.mkv', the (and rightly so) most popular up-and-coming video format, that has been around for a while, and is extremely flexible), tagging is a large part of the specification.

I believe the true reason for the lack of tags lies in the hands of the media players. Sure, most video players have basic playlist support, and some even support 'collections' of video, but in no way have we reached the same level of ease-of-use as audio players.

My current playback software of choice for audio is Amarok, one of the few pieces of QT software infecting my Gnome desktop (the other main one being Shaman, the very capable Pacman GUI). Amarok has a great collection function which allows you to access all your music by a range of methods, and due to my meticulously tagged FLAC collection, it's great.

On the other hand, my video playback software, ironically enough, also QT based, is SMPlayer. Now, SMPlayer is an excellent video player, by far the best I have come across, and yet, it does not in any way handle my collection of media whatsoever. It is very much designed to play a video, then close. While it may do this job very well, it does not enable me to watch series of video together, browse through my library for the thing I want, an so forth. Sure, there are playlists, but it's simply not as fluid as it should be in today's world.

Of course, I hear the cries. "But no media is tagged, such an ability will remain unused. It is quite clearly the media provider's fault!"

This may be true, and we end up with the all to familiar chicken and egg situation. The providers won't provide that meta-data until it is used, and the players won't use the tags unless they are there.

So, what is the solution? Well, I say that the simplest solution is to write in the functionality and then it will eventually get used. It is easier to write some code into popular media players than it is to convince every source of video data (many of which are people at home, who don't even know how to embed this data into their video) to add in the tags.

Of course, with the current craze for streaming video wherever possible (which seems highly counter-productive towards bandwidth usage), tagging is less important to the video providers than before.

Overall, adding metadata to video is something that needs to be done far more than it currently is. Online today, video is becoming an ever more popular method of showing people information. I feel it's important to get off to a good start. Matroska has many features that really will help, it's great codec and subtitle support, support for ordered chapters, and tagging support that is very capable.

Now we just need to see these things get used.