This is a quick follow up to the Grid Computing column of a couple weeks ago.

As suspected, there is a product called videoclix (and probably others) that allows to create hotspots in a video where you can click into a streaming video and – of course – buy stuff. It supports everything Quicktime supports including DV, which means it works on low level formats. It is not a real-time solution though, which is not required for the content creation and marketing customers for whom this product seems to be developed. They say they add about 20K of metadata to each minute of video, which seems to be minimal for the use I envision.

Adding metadata to frames is an interesting topic, and one I’m unfortunately not very familiar with. So I dove into the fascinating world of I, P, and B frames, and believe me, I haven’t surfaced since. There is so much more than meets the eye to digital video transmission and I still do my basic homework. Conceptually, it could work though (remember, we wanted to stream grid displays from a server to the client, and allow the user to interact with the display)

The processing of data into a display is all done on the server, hot (clickable) zones are added on the fly and the frame is streamed to the user, who sees the same bitmap as he would, if the grid would paint the screen on the client directly. A click would then be transformed into either a server request (thin client solution) or an action on the client workstation, or both. Since the frame is decorated with its context by the meta data, the traditional MVC pattern could be applied. (The wiki entry is confusing on the topic, I think the linked page is clearer)

Definitely, there will be more on the topic. It’s so much fun to play around with moving images.