Playlist

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Playlist


A - mostly ordered - set of contents what semantically group together.

Contents

Description

A playlist puts the material in context; usually built upon some similiarity: same theme, same mood, or at least, same taste of the producer,

Short parts of a long material can be viewed at once, or separately (good, if annotation not present, or material length is limited, like on youtube)

Enables organization of material (ie. favourites) SHALL WE USE PLAYLISTS TO COVER FAVOURITES AS WELL?

The term originally came from radio stations, where pre-recorded materials (such as top list shows) were previously recorded to one tape.

Input

  • Manual
  • Collaborative
  • Automatic

Manual

Explicit
The user simply creates a list of materials.
Implicit
The user tells, which video comes next (dependency-graph, list structure)

Collaborative

Time-based
Materials added first are on the top of the list (like in YouTube groups)
Wiki-style
Materials can be re-organized, new materials can be added anytime, by anybody
Real-time
based on votings, at the end of each material, votes are collected, and a new element is added to the end of the list. This is the typical feature of music TV channels
Aggregated
based on other playlists, the most probable video comes next

Automatic

Real-time
A random video is selected after each video
Part-based
The program determines, which video could be a part of a larger set, and works accordingly

Storage

This data can be stored in peer-to-peer fashion, although it's recommended that user's own playlists are always cached on clientside and/or retrieved upon login.

Output

The output is an iterator service, which determines an order between materials.

Playlists are often published, shared, rated, etc, and have a great part in recommendation, especially between people with similiar preferences, or great reputations (like iTunes' Celebrity playlists)

Dependencies

Tools used

  • user identification
  • rating

FILE METADATA? RECOMMENDATION?

Tools using this tool

  • recommendation

Management

Interface

  • It should always be obvious, where the playlist is positioned (the rank of the current material)
  • It should be obvious, what comes next (at least, the directly next material)
  • It should be obvious, what has just passed
  • Reorganization should be easy (drag-n-drop style, for example)
  • Adding new materials should be easy (even from another set of materials)
  • When voting, it should be obvious what it should be done to get a given material into the queue
  • When voting, it should be obvious, if a material cannot be selected for a given period (and how long does this period take yet)

Prevalence

On YouTube, playlists are extensively used for grouping splitted-up videos together.

Most popular media players contain some kind of playlist handling, and it's a main factor of usability for a significant group of users.

When materials already constitute an - ordered - set, for example, music tracks usually form an album, it's usually expected to handle such sets accordingly.

Some people - who like to tidy things - could have found playlist as a reasonable organization tool.

KONRKÉTUMOK ÁT A PÉLDÁKBA

Technical problems

Voting raises a lot of technical questions, like timing, etc. Usual playlists aren'treal complications.

Social aspects

Community

Norms and rules

Incentives and sanctions

There should be an incentive for sharing playlists. Like, playlists could also be rated, and best playlist authors get a better access to the system.

Sanctions could not be thought (with the exception that - in theory - playlists can be also copyrighted, like tracklist of CDs, but a case haven't seen that someone wanted this kind of copyright to take effect).

Techniques

It's advised to allow handling of private playlists - thus, requiring privacy handling at information storage as well.

Most probably private materials should have private playlists as well, at least, when metadata is private too. That way, a playlist could probably inherit its publicity from its members, but it makes unexpected results in some cases (when someone adds a private video, therefore making the whole playlist private, it suddenly disappears for others).

Problems

Implementation

Being still general, and trying to be standardized, we propose playlist handling in fusion to follow the Iterator design pattern, therefore creating an Iterator service for plugin modules to use, as well, as external applications.

Existing examples

NEM SZABVÁNYOK KELLENEK, HANEM PÉLDÁK: ITUNES, YOUTUBE, MYSPACE, LASTFM

  • M3U and PLS formats for music playlists
  • XSPF open standard for shareable playlists (see XSPF homepage)
  • W3C open standard for synchronized multimedia presentations (See SMIL Homapage)
  • Meta-containers for microsoft video formats (ASX)

And playlists have a major role, for example, in [youtube.com YouTube] as well.

There are a few playlist-sharing sites as well, like [webjay.com WebJay] and [plum.com Plum]

Application in Fusion

For audio/video files

As mentioned earlier, most media manager applicaitons are expected to handle playlists as well, therefore Fusion's client application may not be an exception.

KONRKÉT PÉLDÁK AUDIO/VIDEO ALKALMAZÁSRA

In P2P systems

There's no known peer-to-peer system with playlist handling, however, with an integrated media player, this would be a trivial extension.

SHAREAZA, SOULSEEK: filelists

Scenarios

  • I'd like to have all course materials from psychology to be in a playlist, as it came in semester.
  • I'd like to have a Tv-series in a playlist
  • I'd like to have all materials of a given member in a competition in chronological order

???? KONKRÉT PÉLDÁK A LÉTEZŐ SCENARIOKBOL

Communities

Community using collections, or series of materials could get a good use of playlists.

Related tools

RECOMMENDATION PROFILE

External links

Personal tools