INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: Dean Roddey on March 25, 2006, 02:01:35 pm

Title: Unique id for each title?
Post by: Dean Roddey on March 25, 2006, 02:01:35 pm

Hey guys, one thing that's come up for us is a way to uniquely refer to a given media title, in a way that will not ever change. Do you guys generate a unique id for the titles? If not, could you? And if so, could you export it in the XML data?

The issue for us is having a way to persist a reference to a given title that will remain valid (as long of course as the title isn't removed from the J.R. database and possibly re-added later.) With our own repository, we can of course provide this, but for external repositories that we import, we have no way to impose such a persistant title indentifier on them.

It seems like it would be fairly straightforward, and very useful. It could be an MD-5 hash of the title/track text or just a constantly incrementing number that is never reused.

Title: Re: Unique id for each title?
Post by: Matt on March 25, 2006, 09:36:03 pm

Each file has a unique "key".  This is available through the SDK, and is the recommended way to identify a file.  Keys are very fast, guaranteed unique, and have tightly defined semantics -- as opposed to using filename or something else like that.

Currently keys are written to XML outputs because they aren't meaningful across libraries.  For this reason, they're only used internally and through the SDK.

Title: Re: Unique id for each title?
Post by: Dean Roddey on March 25, 2006, 11:38:41 pm

The SDK isn't something we use, so that wouldn't help us much. For our purposes though, the ids would be valid. We are always looking at the same database, so there's not an issue of mixing them really.

Title: Re: Unique id for each title?
Post by: Dean Roddey on March 26, 2006, 09:49:54 pm

Oh, BTW, just to show some of your data at work, here are some snaps from the latest CQC interfaces I've done for my own system. I think they look pretty nice and make it really easy to access the metadata and do playback.

This is the music browsing. Press a title and get preview info at the bottom. Pressing either of the buttons at the bottom will either start the selected title playing and then take you to the nex screen, or just take you there without selecting a new title.

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web/Gallery/CQCDemo1/MusicOverlay.jpg

The next screen is the now playing music screen:

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web/Gallery/CQCDemo1/CurMusicOverlay.jpg