Wiretap Terminology
You need to know the following terms to clearly understand the information in this guide.
Wiretap
Wiretap is a cross-platform client-server interoperability framework that provides high-performance access to remote media and metadata using the Wiretap API. For example, you can examine and manipulate the clip library metadata using a common interface in Wiretap. Frame data exchange services are also provided using optimized, high-performance communication protocols.
Wiretap Server
A Wiretap server is a service that exposes a proprietary or public database as a tree-like hierarchy of Wiretap nodes.
IFFFS
Exposes the proprietary Creative Finishing clip library database as a hierarchy of projects, workspaces, libraries, clips, and others.
Gateway
Exposes the contents of filesystems as a Wiretap hierarchy of directories, clips, files, and other objects.
Backburner
Exposes the Backburner Manager’s database of jobs, servers, server groups, and others.
In each case, the Wiretap server presents the database contents in a consistent and predictable manner. A Wiretap server is typically a daemon running on a host machine.
Wiretap Client
A Wiretap client is a program that uses the Wiretap Client API to communicate with a Wiretap server. A Wiretap client can be a desktop or web application, an adapter/plug-in for another application, a Python module, or even a batch file. Generally, a particular Wiretap client communicates with a particular Wiretap server implementation only. For example, the IFFFS Wiretap server, Wiretap Gateway server, or Backburner Wiretap server. Typically, the client uses the services offered by the server to push or pull media across the network. For Backburner, the client can initiate jobs, monitor jobs, and so on.
Nodes and Node IDs
A node is a single element in the hierarchy of a database exposed by a Wiretap server. For example, a node can be a project, library, or clip contained in the clip library database of its associated application. Each node is identified by a node ID (a string that uniquely and persistently identifies each node on a particular Wiretap host).
Frame
A frame is a data buffer representing a single image (for video frames) of a clip node. You can frames for any data type including audio and formatted image data. A frame can represent an individual image or a tile of a stream such as, an audio stream.
Frame Format
A frame format is a set of parameters needed to decode or interpret frame data. The parameters include a format tag used to identify the frame data encoding algorithm. For example, rgb or aiff.
Metadata
Metadata is a node-specific ASCII data stream. The metadata stream can be in EDL or XML. The stream syntax is dependent on the Wiretap server.