Alfresco for audio / video file management?

[christophd]

Hi all,

just a quick question:

How well does Alfresco (running community edition 3.2 at the moment) support content management of audio and video files?

I just tried uploading a random sound sample to Alfresco and the upload seems to work fine yet I can't find the file when using the search functionality in the browser based Share component. Additionally since I uploaded the audio files the document library seems to get stuck at "Loading the Document Library…" (only in IE8 though, Chrome seems to do fine).

Regardless of the browser I can access the files via the "Recently Modified Documents" dashboard component though there it says under Metadata: "Not enough configuration found for item "cm:content", at least one <show> element must be present."

So I'm somewhat confused with regard to the default capabilities when it comes to audio / video file formats. Are there plugins or extensions for example to do things like reading an .MP3 file's ID3 tags and putting them into the metadata field of the Document Library?

Any pointers, comments and advice are much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Christoph

[jsauer]

Hi,
thanks for your response. I made some progress. So just an update and further questions…

First of all the debugger fires now. No idea what made this change. During MP3MetadataExtracter.extractRaw call in at the line

MP3File mp3File = new MP3File(tempFile);‍

I get an exception. As I do not have the sources of org.farng.mp3.MP3File.MP3File(File file) at hand I can not debug into it right now.

But this and a hint of a colleague drove me to the conclusion that there might is a problem with the mp3 file. And it is! I tried another one just downloaded from the web and it works! The files I have on my harddisk - mainly ripped from my original CDs by iTunes SW do all not work.

On my windows machine get no response or information at all if extraction fails. The same files on my Linux server create an error message if I do Extract common metadata fields from content .
Error Message:

Please correct the errors below then click Finish. 
Failed to run Actions due to error: null‍‍

In case someone likes to analize the mp3 files I could send them to you.

Anyway I tried some files from different sources now and it seems that most of them do not work! This leads me to the conclusion that MP3MetadataExtracter is not quite suitable for production use, is it? 😞

I also added the two properties mentioned in min's response. The correct code snippet is:

<property name="mp3:inheritDefaultMapping">
   <type>d:boolean</type>
   <default>true</default>
</property>
<property name="mp3:failOnTypeConversion">
   <type>d:boolean</type>
   <default>false</default>
</property>    
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

One other thing what makes me wonder is how come MP3MetadataExtracter.extractRaw is being called on file upload already (upload through Web-Explorer) but Metadata just shows up when I do another Extract common metadata fields from content ?

Any ideas and thanks for your replies.
Jörg

[min]

Perhaps there is one mp3 metadata field in particular which is causing the problem.  Using one of the MP3s which won't load, why don't you strip out, one field at a time from your properties file until it works.  Then put the other fields back into the properties file.  At least then you'll which one is causing the problem.  Worst case you could preprocess the MP3s to correct the data in the field that is giving you the problem (e.g., put spaces instead of nulls in the field).

[jsauer]

Hi,
I don't think it will work by stripping out properties as the exception is being thrown in the MP3File constructor. Must be an incompability with the class.
Will debug this a little further when I find time and the source code…

Any other ideas, someone else?
Thanks
Jörg