I’ve got a heck of a project percolating at work. Basically, we’re going to be taking a ton of old surgical education videos that have been digitized and saved in a fairly proprietary WMV format and posting them in a much nicer, Video iPod compatible M4V format.
Fortunately, queueing them up for compression is something that can be done in big batches and left to render overnight. Unfortunately, re-compressing the video means that all of the tags and comment fields indicating which doctor it is and what surgery they’re performing are lost and need to be re-entered. We have it in a database, but copying and pasting back and forth between it and a couple hundred movie files is going to be a huge hassle.
Then I found this post from a guy who had a similar problem and solved it using PERL script and a well formatted XML file. I showed it to one of our programmers this morning and he thinks he can cobble together a script that will fix the tags on a couple hundred videos in a few seconds. I’ll post it here if it all works out.