in a networked environment which includes data communication lines 112 122 132 and 142 some variants of such a system include analog sources 102 may be any of a number of possible sources such as an analog or digital tape deck a laser disc player a live satellite feed a live video camera etc a video signal such as ntsc or pal is all that is needed for input into the video cataloger 110 metadata server 130 may be as simple as a file system containing hypertext markup language html files or as complex as a relational database supporting a client server application environment for media management client interfaces may be html web browsers java or native client applications for example digital video encoding 120 the existence of digital video is an optional component it may be the case that the metadata merely indexes video that resides on analog video tapes stored on shelves content server 140 may be as simple as a file system containing digital video files or as complex as a digital video stream server such as those offered by real networks silicon graphics mediabase oracle ovs and the like digital video formats digital video data is encoded by an encoder process 120 and communicated to the content server 140 over a network channel 122 the format of the digital video may be any of a wide variety of formats such as real video at various bit rates from 20 kbps up to 500 kbps mpeg 1 at various bit rates up to 3 5 mbps mpeg 2 at various bit rates.