So I've finally made the move to St. Paul, MN and am working for Tightrope full time and only partially helping out my old PEG station through the internet. This means that I finally have some "free" time to do some developing for the Open Media Project. There has been a bunch of talk on IRC lately about separating some of the functionality in the different modules and I think Krenyen has already done a lot towards that with the simpler om_show module and the new om_airing module.
So I think what needs to be discussed now is exactly where to put vender specific code (submodules obviously) and how to break up that functionality. I'm relatively new to the Open Media stuff, and I am still learning how all the modules interact. Krenyen brought up that it would be good to discuss what is needed from each vendor, so that we can try to make the higher level stuff compatible with all vendors and hopefully even support stations that happen to be running multiple vender ( like Denver Open Media will be soon).
So I'll do the first post about what is needed for Tightrope Media Systems's Cablecast.
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Comments
Tightrope Cablecast Requirements
So here is what is bare bones need from Tightrope Media Systems Cablecast.
Administrative Stuff
Cablecast has the concept of locations, meaning that one Cablecast Server could control equipment located at different "locations". Basically a "location" in cablecast essentially means a routing video switcher. Shows belong to locations, and each location can have multiple channels. In practice though, very few stations use this capability, and I think it would be better to just ignore it for now.
So here is whats needed for settings.
Creating / Updating Show Record
I am assuming Drupal is going to be the major meta data repository, because Cablecast is much more limited in the ability to customize the metadata is. What Cablecast needs is a title and at least one "Reel". In Cablecast a Reel is a piece of media. A show can be made up of multiple Reels. Each Reel has a Length, Pre-Roll (unless its a "live" source), a "Format" and a Title and Chapter (if the Reel is a DVD). A "Format" tells cablecast where to look for a particular show or what source to play out over the channel. A typical station would have a Format for the Video Server, a Satellite Feed, a Studio Feed, and a Bulletin Board. So for bare bones show creation on Cablecast the following is needed:
When a show is created a unique showID (absolutely unique - even across locations) will be returned.
Scheduling a Show
In Cablecast shows are scheduled to channels. When the programmer is done scheduling for a period of time they send "Autopilot" Autopilot takes whatever the programmer scheduled on all channels at a location and figures out how to make it work given the devices that are available. It will then return a swap list for decks and DVD changers. If video servers are used, that is not necessary. There is no way in the API currently to send Autopilot, so this step still must be done manually. It is planned in the future for this to be added to the API, but not until the next major release. Cablecast looks on the content drives and identifies all the shows by there unique showID (see above) so there is no need to keep track of individual files.
In order to schedule a show on Cablecast here is what is needed:
So those that are more familiar with the others vendors (Telvue, Leightronix, Synergy, etc...) please chime in so we can get the ball rolling on the next step of deciding how to approach this in the best way.
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Nerd at work