Video is one type of document. However, unlike traditional documents and databases that are searchable, video is not. At the same time, video is typically lengthy and contains large amount of useful and/or useless information. Therefore, it is desired to make the video manageable and searchable.

Metadata and scene annotation are two keys to resolve this challenge. In this thesis we designed and implemented an XML-based Movie Database Manager (MDM) as a proof of concept. The video information is well organized in its natural way and stored in one single XML file. Videos are divided into user defined scenes with annotations for quick and exact query with build-in query engine. Users can also create, edit, and delete scenes annotations without physically split them in the video files. MDM integrates the query builder to help users run pre-defined queries or create and maintain their own ones. These queries can be stored in the same XML file. A full functional video player is also implemented to help user play their query results, create / edit / delete scene annotations.