In this video,
we will discuss why we might need to use different types
of tools when dealing with web media.
Fundamentally,
you would think that acquiring data from the web
should be the same in all cases,
requiring only one tool because, at the end of the day,
we're dealing with data that transfers over a network.
The reality, however,
is that due to the type, size, and the various methods of delivery
that we deal with when interacting with media data,
there are usually multiple steps involved that require
different tools to achieve our goal.
In addition to the process of identifying and downloading the media itself,
we also need to be aware of the tools and methods available to use to
both extract and to use the media data that we acquire.
When we're dealing with standard text‑based data,
it's clear that we only need to open the file and we can see its contents,
even if sometimes we need to format it a bit to clean it up like,
for example, in the HTML or Markdown display types.
Web media is different in this regard, and there are a multitude of
different tools available to use, not only for acquiring data, but also
for working with the data once we have it.
How we acquire the data and work with its content depends very
much on the type of data we're dealing with.
Let's look now at some of the different media types we can encounter
on the web and examine the characteristics of each that can help us to
identify the different types of tools that we need to use when
acquiring the specific type of data.
The table we're looking at represents some of the most common types
of media that you'll encounter, covering images,
video, audio, and documents.
As you can see, even for what we think of as basic media files,
there are actually a multitude of different subtypes and
formats of these that we can encounter.
A simple JPEG image can have different extension types, for example JPG,
JPEG, JPE, and JFIF.
Similarly,
the MPEG media format comes in a number of different flavors, MP2
and MPA, representing audio, and MPE, MPEG,
MPG, and MP4, covering video. Acquiring the media data is
not simply about downloading the files.
It's about being able to extract the data contained in the media. Here is a
basic list of characteristics that can help us know what types of tools we
need to use when acquiring media data. File size.
If the file is large,
we need to consider tools to handle storage and network bandwidth accordingly.
Server resume support.
This is mostly relevant for large files and requires specific tools and
techniques to address reliably. Protected and licensed media.
If the data that we're acquiring is protected by license,
it may need a specific decoder to extract the data. Data encoding type. Just
as we have different dialects of spoken languages, there can be different
formats for packaging together what, in the face of it, is the same data, and
this is defined by the data encoding type.
This list is just a tip of the iceberg. And as you can imagine,
the tools that you use are mostly based on the particular
use case that your solution requires.
In the next module,
we look at how to extract media links from a web page and use that to
help us determine the tool chain that we might require.