I am somewhat surprised that there is nothing that can be readily identified as “the” media tagging format for video content.
ID3 has spawned an industry of supporting software and pretty much everything capable of playing MP3 supports it as a tagging format. It has proved essential to organizing large libraries of music.
There are mature, stable libraries for reading and writing the format.
Where is the equivalent for video? Xvid is the de-facto video codec, but not a whiff of a similar format that I could find.
XMBC supports additional metadata about movies, but it stores in a seperate cache for its internal use, which is not a portable approach. I want my video to have metadata no matter where it is or what plays it. I also want metadata so a Tag & Rename style equivalent can normalize my media directory structure and file naming.
Update: I found this after finally nailing the right Google keywords. Happily, the developer of the software, is a developer’s developer, and put up links (and source) to how he implemented it. Now all it needs is some application with reach to adopt this instead of inventing their own seperate out-of-file format.
Seems there’s a bit of an opportunity here for someone to just go ahead and implement support for a few pluggable apps and get some traction.