Madeleine Mendell, CUNY TV, Fall 2020, NEH
At CUNY-TV, my internship focused primarily on CUNY TV’s media micro-services that handle (link to Github). The media micro-service framework serves as the foundation for the archival workflow at CUNY-TV of ingesting files, making derivatives, and moving them to the appropriate storage, amongst many things. This workflow is comprised of many different individual scripts that carry out the functions and work with each other, making media micro-services a modular system in which it is more easily changed and adapted to fit to developments, issues, and updates. Reading Dinah Handel’s NDSR post “Media micro-services and archival workflows at CUNY Television” was an excellent foundation for coming into the internship and understanding what my work would entail but more so laid the groundwork for what my relationship to learning to script with bash and XML would look like: lots and lots of failure, experimentation, and finally, figuring out how to make something work the way I wanted it to.
Most of my work entailed updating the GUIs (graphical user interfaces) from one form (Pashua) to another (GTKDialog, which is also used in vrecord) that are a part of the media micro-services as well as adding options for different functions as they became needed by CUNY TV. For example, I added functionality for uploading multiple files for the ingestfile function, which ingests individual episodes or elements of the shows that CUNY TV broadcasts and then archives. This functionality became newly necessary during the pandemic as producers could not transfer files over the server and had to send single videos as multiple files. This new layer of code would be able to ingest the two files, use rsync to move them as before, and then use existing ffmpeg code to piece them together. While editing media micro-services to augment a number of existing functions (adding in a stopgap for variable audio frame rate and validation for PBCore IDs and other forms), I also worked to create a new GUI layout for the home dialog of vrecord that will act as a simple GUI for more ease of use.
Madeleine Mendell interned at CUNY TV in Fall 2020.
