Interoperable Access to Video Content as a Basis for Collaborative Video Editing

Many digital file formats, which are used every day for different purposes or in different domains, are serialized as simple text. As plain text is a very simple serialization format, numerous tools, which provide general functionality for text, can thus be used for lots of different file formats. It is one reason why the principle of collaboration can easily be ported from one domain to another one as long as the exchange format is text-based. For binary, and consequently more complex formats, specific tools are usually necessary. In this paper, we present an approach that allows for the creation and textual serialization of videos that are composed of other centrally provided videos. We further introduce a library implementation that enables general-purpose tools to constitute the technical basis for collaborative video editing in an on- and offline setting.