Live television in a digital library

Abstract

The number of channels of digital television is increasing, particularly the number that are free-to-air. However due to the nature of broadcasting, this morass of information is not, for the main part, organized - -it is principally a succession of images and sound transmitted as multiplexed streams of data. Compare this deluge that terrestrially bombards our homes with the information available in the digital libraries we access over the Internet - -stored using software purpose built to help organize carefully curated sets of documents. This project brings together these two seemingly incompatible concepts to develop a software environment that concurrently captures all the available live television channels - -so a user does not need to proactively choose what to record - -and segments them into files which are then imported into a digital video library with a user interface designed to work from a multimedia remote control. A shifting time-based "window" of all recordings is maintained - -we settled on from the last two weeks so as to be practicably operable on a regular desktop PC. The system leverages off the information contained in the electronic program guide and the video recordings to generate metadata suitable for the digital library. A user evaluation of the developed prototype showed a high level of participant satisfaction across a range of attributes, notably date-based searching.