The VideoLAN Forums

I am wanting to write a small media server for my home network. I will probably write it in Java, because that is where I feel the most at ease. As part of this project I need to be able to read the meta data describing the artist, album, track name, etc. Can anyone suggest a good library for doing this (it can be Java or C/C++)? Can libVLC respond to this task? Ideally the library would be currently maintained and have a stable API.

I am planning to use this either on MacOS X or Linux.

Replying to my own post, and more for reference for anyone else:

I found two distinct solutions, one for MP3 and one for MP4 (both open source):
- ISOBox4J: https://contributions.coremedia.com/isobox4j
- Java Music Tag: http://javamusictag.sourceforge.net

I also saw some non Java solutions:
- ffmpeg, but according to a post ( http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=43048 ), the API is in flux, so not of much use
- Atomic Parsley ( http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/ ), which does a good job.

One thing, in regards to MP4, is that I couldn't seem to find any references to an official set of meta-tags for the sorts of things specified in MP3's IDv3 tags. The only references are to the Apple defined tags. Am I to understand that people are just using what Apple has already defined, rather than making an independent set?

Hi,

I'm also interested in getting metadata from MP4 files (and other video files). Have you (or anybody) found any other information on how to perform this task?

I thought VLC, while encoding, would access the metadata in a video file, but as I'm extremely new in this, it's been hard for me to find something related to it in the VLC source code.

Thanks for your help

VLC uses taglib to read/write meta-data. That's a really nice an working library. Have a look here: http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html and ther http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=bl ... 1b;hb=HEAD