This document is http://videdot.com/old/interim-report.html
At: videdot/old/interim-report.html
This report describes the state of play as at 8th March 2001. It covers:
These are best spelt out in the Outsourcing Report, together with the Requirements and Design Decisions documents.
In short, the aim of videdot is to provide a black box appliance video recorder, using the network to collect listings, support collaboration and enable remote access.
An overall skeleton of much of the project has been built, notably for the core videdot application.
XML listings, supplied by the Press Association, are being funnelled into indexed, attributed files the Fetcher application. They are being pulled out as appropriate by the listings part of the videdot application and shown by channel between particular time ranges.
Tests have been carried out using the appropriate constructs which will be needed. Application invocation, queries, nested views have all worked suitably in tests, and the skeletal videdot application is displaying listings appropriately.
Is at http://videdot.com/timeplan.html, which will be updated as time passes. The aim is to produce a functional product by the end of term. Time has been allowed for at the end of this term for possible slippages. After a break for revision and exams, the focus next term is on producing the final report, installation software and some possible extended features.
Given the present work completed, the remaining large obstacles are in invoking playback effectively and in ensuring recording quality is up to scratch.
The obvious fallback situations are to encode at a lower quality, and to use the simplest method of invocation for playback. I have already tried small tests with invoking the standard Be MediaPlayer, which can start in full screen mode appropriately.
Technically, enough tests have been carried out that the critical sections of the project are known to work. Editing, updating and querying attributes works well, both from native C++ code and also from scripts.
The remaining possibility is that time will simply run out. The 'solution' to this would be to trim some of the more time consuming extra features which are postulated in the Outsourcing Report. For example, some of the more ambitious elements of the installation procedure could always be carried out with a simple bash script. The networking and collaboration elements could be trimmed back. These fallback positions are already laid out in the outsourcing document.