Digital Video - November 2008 - (Page 40)

CLICK TO PLAY starting at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/ forpros/drm/sdksandversions.aspx 2. Add DRM protection to the WMV files (another batch process) 3. Design the license procurement / renewal system 4. Set up the license server and create the ASP pages to handle license requests 5. Program the client to contact the server for license acquisition Designing the license procurement and renewal system first is crucial. A basic system won’t require a lot of code to set up, but as services increase in scope and you begin to add asset and license management tools, your code base will grow exponentially. You don’t need to be a professional programmer, but sophisticated Web developer skills are essential. The License Server is basically the Windows Media DRM SDK on a MS Web server. This server can be hosted by the content provider or even a third-party license broker APPLESCRIPTING THE FLIP4MAC PHASE Figure 2. Flip4Mac-enabled QuickTime Pro: Report to export to WMV that one process is serial, the other parallel. As noted above, Flip4Mac is an add-in to QuickTime. The Studio version lets QT Pro export to WMV using the otherwise familiar QT Player UI, which includes the handy “Most Recent Settings.” This is key to both DIY scenarios (see Figure 2). I thought I had found a simple but effective AppleScript to customize for this particular task, but there was one fatal flaw. The script is listed at right, along with a workaround suggestion from Telestream. Good thing there was a Plan B, and that it worked. Five batches of 10 took the better part of four days (including spot checks of finished batches and setup of new batches) but there were no crashes. The resulting WMVs played normally in the Windows Media Player and accepted the DRM bits just like WMVs captured on the PC. Here are the guts of the fatally-flawed batch conversion script. If you copied and successively pasted the block of lines between the first and last “tell” lines as many times as you had source movies, using actual source and target file names instead of mymovie, you could build the complete script quickly and easily. Or you could use a loop to process all the files in a specified folder. Google is rife with such examples, needless to say. WINDOWS MEDIA DRM REDUX The final phase of the overall job was the least risky because I had done it several times before without incident. It was neither free nor completely DIY, but I believe it’s worth a short review here to give the other phases extra context. While most people feel that DRM is more trouble than it’s worth, some vertical markets still require it, and indie videographers are usually expected to know a few details regarding such production issues. Remember that the system described above acquires licenses for video files stored locally — as opposed to downloading the media and then obtaining a license. The latter scenario is not inherently more complicated but does require including and managing the download process. Movielink (www.movielink.com) is a good example of a consumer-oriented service for acquiring media files to which licenses are applied at download time. The main DRM components/milestones of this project were: 1. Obtain the Windows Media DRM SDK from Microsoft, tell application “QuickTime Player” open file “seagate120gig:mymovie.mp4” with timeout of 36000 seconds – adjustable ten hour time limit export movie 1 to file “seagate120gig:mymovie.wmv as WMV using most recent settings” close movie 1 end timeout end tell The problem is that QuickTime Pro does not support “as WMV” even with Flip4Mac installed (normally you would see “as AVI” or “as MPG” at that point in the script). According to Telestream product management, QuickTime Player does not include AppleScript support for exporting in any format other than what comes bundled with QuickTime itself. They did suggest creating an Apple Compressor setting that uses the WMV format, but such software development is beyond the scope of this column (for now). Again, nice to have a Plan B. DV www.dv.com 40 dv november 2008 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/drm/sdksandversions.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/drm/sdksandversions.aspx http://www.movielink.com http://www.dv.com

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Digital Video - November 2008 Contents AG-HMC150 Camcorder I-Cuff Eyepiece Protector Instant Expert Avid Media Composer 3.0 DT-B9L 1DU Monitor Flolight LCD500 Dark Red Close-Up: Chop Shop Socky Prime Mover Tools & Technology: DV Expo Toolkit Click to Play DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - November 2008

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