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We can use ID3 tagging to add metadata to music files.

Are there any similar tagging formats (metadata containers) for video files (e.g. flv, mpg, avi, wmv, etc)?

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Oh, there are tagging facilities for videos, there's just not one single format for all video containers. Most containers roll their own solution, such as FLV and MKV.

Still, there's the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP). Here's Adobe's official developer site. It's a standard developed by Adobe defined to store Metadata for media such as images and videos. The files are mostly XML, as XMP uses RDF for data representation.

Anyway, you can use XMP for the following files:

  • MP4 – the MPEG4 Part 10 video container
  • AVI – the Audio-Video-Interleave format by Microsoft
  • any other file, by creating a separate .xmp file along the actual data.

You can use various tools to read and write this data, Wikipedia lists a few.

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I like the idea 'Extensible Metadata Platform' format. Actually, is there any technology like this - A compression file that keep a video file (any format) and a XML file (that allows all sort of tagging) inside it. A video player will then play the compression file and allow user to edit the tagging description. I do not know if there is such technology or software out there but if there is, please share with the community. – Wilson Tan Sep 14 '11 at 1:35
None that I know of, unfortunately. Since AVIs are quite common, and MP4 can be used for h.264-compressed video (which is today's standard), I'd say most use cases are already covered. Unfortunately, MP4 isn't used as much (people rather use MKV for this). – slhck♦ Sep 14 '11 at 7:11
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I don't think that it is possible to globally tag multiple video types. The only video tagging I know of is about AVI tags. Long long time ago, there was a program called abcAVI Tag Editor.

abcAVI Tag Editor allows you to get information on movie from Internet Movie Database or type it by yourself and save that info inside AVI file. Supports RIFF INFO tags, MovieID tags, IDivX tags. Allows editing more than 40 tags, not only "Title", "Subject" and "Copyright". Support of RIFF INFO tags ensures backward compatibility with standard Windows players like Windows Media Player.

It's old but still works fine with Windows 7 in XP compatibility mode.

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The program abcAVI Tag editor is a freeware but based on the description, it can only deal with tagging for AVI file. This pose a problem as our end-user may post any video format files and we will be busy converting them to AVI. – Wilson Tan Sep 14 '11 at 1:32
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  • avi (AVI) – yes, as RIFF "INFO" chunk and/or XMP
  • flv (Flash Video) – only in F4V (Flash Video v4)
  • mkv (Matroska) – yes
  • mp4 (MP4) – yes
  • mpg/mpeg (MPEG-1) – don't know
  • ogg/ogv/ogm (Ogg) – no built-in support, several unofficial formats exist
    • audio files use the Vorbis codec metadata
  • wma/wmv (ASF) – yes
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Thanks grawity for listing down those format and if tagging can be used. Kind of sad to know that each video format have their own tagging mechanisms. – Wilson Tan Sep 14 '11 at 1:30
@Wilson: I listed containers, not video formats. For example, a raw MPEG-4 video stream can be inside AVI, Matroska, MP4, or FLV containers, but it doesn't have any tags by itself. – grawity Sep 14 '11 at 10:07
ok I hope that I got your point - what you mean is that you listed the containers (e.g. avi, flv, mkv, mp4) and not the raw video format (e.g. MPEG-4, MPEG-2, H.263) - do correct me if I still misunderstand your point. So, I can say that some of the containers do support tagging (e.g. mkv, mp4) while some not, right? – Wilson Tan Sep 16 '11 at 2:11
@Wilson: Correct. – grawity Sep 16 '11 at 13:19

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