FITS tool versions update request

[motz]

hi all,

I found out, that the used metadata extraction tools - which FITS are using - are slightly outdated.

examples:

mediainfo 0.7.74   -> could be easily updated to v0.7.99

exiftool 10.00       -> could be easily updated to v10.63

The mentioned versions are from 2015.
As a result, FITS can't identify common media types nowadays like HEIC. (for instance with the new exiftool version it works).

background for this request:

as I think about a webservice, where FITS is a candidate to run with, I'm not sure about the licence if I'm changing the tools by myself.
Nevertheless, as all users would benefit from it, it might be cool if you could update the toolversions anyway.

thanks in advance!

best, Martin

[dne...@g.harvard.edu]

Thanks for your request. We will look into upgrading these tools with the next FITS update.

[Svenja Lange]

Hi all,

I am using FITS 1.5.0 but no MediaInfo details are shown for some files. Formats such as WAV were only integrated in later versions of MediaInfo. Are there still plans to update the tools?

Thank you

[dne...@g.harvard.edu]

Hello,

We would love to upgrade MediaInfo contained within FITS to the latest version knowing that it is very out of date. This upgrade will require a significant amount of work and testing. However, we currently do not have the dedicated resources to perform this work. We welcome any current FITS users to attempt this upgrade and submit a pull request on the FITS GitHub site.

Best,

David

[Paul.Tr...@mpi.nl]

Hi David,

A fairly straightforward way to use the latest MediaInfo library seems to be by using the "OLDXML" output option. This gives you the old style XML output with an additional root element around it, so it only requires a small change to the existing XSLT as far as I can see. The new style XML output from MediaInfo does look a lot cleaner, e.g. units are no longer part of the value, and there is an XSD. So it would be worth investing some time in rewriting the XSLT at some point, it can probably become a lot simpler.

I've implemented the "OLDXML" solution in our fork here:

https://github.com/TheLanguageArchive/fits

(it also includes some changes to the pom file, the URL for the central maven repo seems to have changed)

I've included v20.08 of the MediaInfo libraries. For Linux I added the one for Redhat 7 x86_64.

I can create a pull request if you think that this is a useful solution for the time being, until someone finds the time to rewrite the XSLT for the new XML output. I haven't done much testing though, none at all on Windows and a little bit on Linux/Mac. I've tried the following setups:

- using FITS as a web service in Tomcat on a SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 server, using the MediaInfo library for that platform

- same as above but using the Red Hat 7 x86_64 MediaInfo library

- using FITS locally on MacOS 10.15.6 using the MacOS MediaInfo library

- using FITS locally on an Ubuntu 18.04 VM using the Red Hat 7 x86_64 MediaInfo library

All seem to work OK. I do experience some stability issues with MediaInfo on the server, it looks like it can't cope very well with multiple requests at the same time, but that's not new, we were having this issue with the currently included MediaInfo version as well. I had hoped that this would be solved by changing to a newer MediaInfo library, but alas...

I also got some test failures when building the application (Differences in XML for file ...), not quite sure how serious those are.

Best regards,

Paul