Hi Epicanis,

Very informative show but I would argue that only metadata necessary for the playout of the file should be included in the file itself.  Everything else should be included in a separate file that itself is dedicated to hold the metatadata. That file might include locations for where other item might be found, eg, a url to the poster location, or a link to the wikipedia article. 

The main reason for this would be to keep the complexity of the playout device as simple, and therefore as cheap , as possible. Your argument that there is enough space in a media file to hold all the metadata breaks down, once you start adding metadata in multiple languages, or extending it to add reviews, sleeve notes, wikipedia articles, reviews etc. At that point the text begins to get very significant indeed and runs the risk of been outdated very quickly.

Fields like, Title/Artist/Album/Track Number/Length, should be included as they are (usually not always) the same in every language, and give playout devices enough information for to display something useful, while another another more compiles, independent, process gathers the richer metadata from all over the web.

In an ideal world a single additional field with a global unique identifier would be enough to identify the work to the player, and allow it to go out an locate the metadata file, which in turn would link to other sources of information.

Ken.