Mediamano is a leading innovator in the management and provision of digital assets for broadcasters. They operate globally, with clients concentrated in Europe and North America. They're specialised and uniquely vendor-agnostic solutions transform the way video is captured, manipulated, archived and provisioned - from field, through the newsroom and to broadcast. Separately, their products transform the operational efficiency of a broadcaster. Together, they have the potential to transform the economic value of digital content.

Mediamano, based in Spain, needed to build a scheduled recording application that could control 2 geographically separated Zones of Quantel sQ servers.

I tendered for the project by writing a 15 page proposal including a design outline with mocked up screen shots and time scales. The proposal was circulated around the interested companies requesting comments and feedback which we re-incorporated back into the proposal.

I built a virtualise test environment consisting of several machines in order to create a Quantel test system with 3 dummy sQ Servers providing ten ports capable of recording different formats.

The recording application uses the View, Model, Controller paradigm. The recording application uses a timeline interface and is accessed via a JavaScript, Ajax, HTML and CSS front end. The Ajax and HttpRequest Objects communicate with PHP programs which organised the schedule stored inside a MySQL database. NodeJS is used to notify clients that the data has changed so they may refresh themselves to reflect the current state of the system. The unix cron was used to start scheduled recordings. The recordings are managed by a Java program that understands the Quantel ISA Manager and Quantel sQ Server's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) protocol. As scheduled events go into record their representation colour changes and thumbnails from the record-head begin to be displayed on each client view. After the record has finished it changes to a satisfying green colour to represent success or red for failure.