Intro

OK folks! This is our second look at how you can leverage the power of Beyond TV in your own code using the methods provided by the Beyond TV SDK. If you are just getting started, please take a look at the first tutorial to get a blow by blow walkthrough of how to set up a fully working Beyond TV sample project. This tutorial assumes you understand all of the setup and license management that we walked you through in the first Beyond TV SDK tutorial.

Today we'll cover one of the most frequently asked questions by developers...how do I read out all the media properties in a recording and how do I add my own? This particular question gets asked a lot by Beyond TV users for several reasons. Some users want to catalog the data when they store their recordings in their own personal spreadsheets or databases. Other users like to edit or manipulate their recordings with third party programs that unfortunately don't know how to keep that metadata around in the file after editing it. And still other users want to be able to use that data to display in their own specially crafted applications or frontends.

Point is, there are plenty of good reasons to read and write the data. It's my distinct pleasure to show you today how to do this with the SDK. in fact, it's so easy that some of you might just be kicking yourself when I'm done walking you guys through it!

Just like the first tutorial, with a couple of small differences

If you went through the first tutorial, you already created a solution and a project named BTVSDKSample1. Using your existing solution, go ahead and create another project exactly like the BTVSDKSample1 project you created, except this time named BTVSDKSample2.

Next, follow the same procedure you did with BTVSDKSample1 to add references to the Beyond TV SDK web services, except this time, you'll be referencing BTVLicenseManager.asmx, BTVDispatcher.asmx, and BTVLibrary.asmx. Don't forget the steps detailed in the first tutorial, especially the namespace changes!

As a side note, we don't actually use BTVDispatcher.asmx in this tutorial, but for the sake of consistency, we reference this class and keep the data type definitions here like we did in the first tutorial for the sake of consistency. It's not good to create multiple projects and have to wonder where you decided to define the PropertyBag types in each project.

New code

OK, for this new walkthrough, you're going to need to pick a recording that you would like to edit. Many of the methods in BTVLibrary take the fully qualified path to a recording as a unique identifier for a recording. The property is called "FullName" in Beyond TV.

For security reasons, Beyond TV will not allow you to reference files that aren't in a directory that Beyond TV is aware of. So make sure your file or recording can already be seen by Beyond TV in one of its video folders.

Let's take a look at our new source example.

As in the first tutorial, edit the networkLicense variable so that it represents your license. Next, edit the fullName variable so that it points to the recording you want to edit.

In this example, we first call the GetMediaByFullName method of BTVLibrary. This retrieves all properties of the recording. We then dump them to the console, as shown below.

OK. That was just a little too easy, wasn't it? If all you want to do is look at the metadata for each recording, you can easily dump or translate this data into any format you wish. I'd recommend using the XML classes in .NET to dump the data if that's where you are heading with your development. By the way, in case you're curious what all of these properties mean and what they do, a thoroughly documented explanation of each property is available in the Beyond TV SDK documentation.

The next task is to actually edit one of these properties. As it turns out, this really isn't much harder.

The PVSPropertyBag base type that is used all over the place in the Beyond TV SDK isn't very friendly for actually manipulating properties. We probably should change this at some point, but for the moment, the best thing for you to do is take the properties and copy them into a friendlier collection or wrapper class that you write yourself. In the source code example, we just dump our PVSPropertyBag into the native ArrayList class in .NET. We then set the "EpisodeDescription" property and create a new PVSPropertyBag. We then pass this PVSPropertyBag into the EditMedia method call. And voila, we are done!

It's probably worth mentioning that some of the media properties are read-only. For example, duration is an inherent property of a media file and you won't be able to set a property to change that. It doesn't hurt to set these types of properties through the SDK, but it doesn't actually do anything.

At any rate, let's take a look at the final result.

As you can see, the description has been successfully edited.

OK, wow. Wasn't that easy? If you hadn't realized by now how simple Beyond TV makes things at every level, you're probably starting to appreciate it now. Editing recording metadata is a cinch using the Beyond TV SDK.

That's all for now, folks. Keep those questions coming in our forums and get your ideas rolling with the power of the Beyond TV SDK!

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