Worker Overview

The CatDV Worker Node is an automated version of the media processing engine found in the CatDV Pro application. It has two main components, the file watcher that watches one or more watch folders looking for new files to process, and the worker, a background thread which waits for and then processes the next available item from a queue of tasks.

The worker node must be configured to define which watch folders it monitors, what operation(s) to perform on these files, and how to access the CatDV server.

To configure the worker you specify:

• common definitions, such as the host name of the CatDV Workgroup or Enterprise Server, or details of an SMTP server for sending email notifications
• the location of the task queue file that the file watchers will add items to and the worker thread will remove items from as it processes them
• a definition of how items are added to the queue, ie. which folder to watch and any filter conditions that the file must fulfil to be processed (such as its filename matching a particular pattern, or it containing media in a particular format)
• a definition of what operations to apply to matching files.

Supported operations that can be performed include the following:

• analyse the file to extract technical metadata such as the video and audio format, sample rate, timecode etc.
• perform automatic scene detection to create separate clips for each scene
• create a CatDV preview movie from the media, or convert it to another format using an arbitrary QuickTime exporter and codec
• publish the clips (ie. details of the file and any scenes that were detected) to the CatDV server
• generate or update an HTML index page listing the processed clips
• send an email notification to selected users notifying them of the new file(s)
• execute an arbitrary operating system command, such as uploading the files to an FTP server, running a shell script or batch file, or anything else.
• move or delete the original media file once it has been processed or converted

The combination of a watch folder, filter condition and job definition is known as a “watch action”. You can define as many watch actions as you want, all with different filter conditions, to automatically process different kinds of file in different ways.

The combination of a task queue file plus a set of watch actions that will cause items to be added to the queue is known as a “work set”. The work set represents a queue of tasks to be performed (or that have already been performed recently).