Next Sydney PostgreSQL Users Group Meeting: May 3

The May meeting of the Sydney PostgreSQL Users Group will be held on the
3rd of May, from 6:30 PM onwards. Unfortunately we weren't able to book
the James Squire Brew House for this month's meeting (long story...), so
we've arranged to have the meeting at the ACS NSW Branch Office, at:

Level 4, 122 Castlereagh Street
Sydney NSW 2000
Ph. 02 9261 4411
Fax. 02 9261 4277

At this month's meeting, Conrad Parker will be giving a talk on
"Building Dynamic Video Webs"; the abstract follows. This should be an
interesting example of the issues and tradeoffs involved in using
PostgreSQL to store video content.

As usual, if you'd like to present a talk at a future meeting of the
Sydney PUG, get in touch with Anand, Gavin or myself.

Regards,

Neil

This session shows you how to use familiar server-side scripting to
build dynamic, interactive video webs. You can use CGI scripting and
database backends to provide customization and personalization of video
content on an unmodified web server. Using normal scripting languages,
you can create hyperlinks into and out of video and manipulate tracks of
timed XML metadata.

Topics covered:

* Learn how to provide annotated video in response to simple
form-input CGIs

* Become familiar with current technologies for video surfing,
and how these interoperate with familiar web browsing

* Learn how to customize and personalize webs of video content

These techniques can be applied to many languages. The session will give
examples of server-side scripting with pyannodex[0], a python interface
for dynamically compositing and querying Annodex media.

Annodex[1] is an open standards based technology that extends the World
Wide Web's hyperlinking, searching, and compositing infrastructure to
time-continuous data, enabling video surfing, searching for clips of
audio and video files using ordinary Web search engines, and on-the-fly
composition of a video on a Web server from previously annodexed clips.

Annodex media is compatible with many existing media frameworks
including Microsoft's DirectShow and the open source players VLC[2] and
xine[3]. However it is best browsed with the Annodex Firefox
Extension[4], an open source, cross-platform application developed in
javascript and XUL for Mozilla Firefox. Apart from the general CGI
techniques covered in this session, Annodex media can most simply be
served out using mod_annodex[5], a module for Apache httpd providing
timed URI handling and CMML pre-processing.

[0] http://nofx.cse.unsw.edu.au/code/pyannodex.pml
[1] http://www.annodex.net/
[2] http://www.videolan.org/
[3] http://www.xinehq.de/
[4] http://www.annodex.net/software/AnnodexFirefoxExtension/
[5] http://www.annodex.net/software/mod_annodex/