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Firefox Plugin Annodex For Searching Audio, Video

Posted by timothy on Tue Feb 15, 2005 05:51 AM
from the well-lookie-and-hearie-here dept.
Media Mozilla The Internet
loser in front of a computer writes "ZDNet Australia reports that 'Australia's CSIRO research organisation has developed a Firefox plugin named Annodex that allows browsing through time-continuous media such as audio and video in the same way that HTML allows browsing through text.' I've just checked Annodex out and it's very cool. The sample video from the Perl conference is way funny too." The catch is, the media to be searched has to be prepped first.
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  • astonishing (Score:5, Funny)

    by rich42 (633659) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @05:53AM (#11675971) Homepage
    the implications for porn surfing are mind numbing.

  • Of course (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shreevatsa (845645) <shreevatsa.slashdot@gma i l . com> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @05:54AM (#11675976)
    The catch is, the media to be searched has to be prepped first.
    Isn't that obvious? It's too much to expect it to be able to search video without knowing what it is.
    • well, to be revolutionary it would require that capability. As it is now, it is simply a toy to play around with and then forget about.

      • Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bogado (25959) <<bogado> <at> <bogado.net>> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:19AM (#11676050) Homepage Journal
        You understand that to be able to search you must read the content before, right? Google does read all the pages to index them, this is a preprocessing stage. I don't see why this requirement is a impediment. Sure video processing is time consuming, but downloading videos are also time and bandwidth consuming, so in general searching videos is harder, much harder then text.
        • But, when the time comes that bandwidth overshadows any realtime video bandwidth, video searching and viewing will become as ubiquitous as email and google now.

          • Re:Of course (Score:3, Interesting)

            by bogado (25959)
            Even if you have the largest bandwidth you can imagine, still local indexes are the way to go. I can't imagine any movie search engine that will not pre-process the movie info, to fit the data into an index first. This pre-processing could be made externally to aid the search engine, and keeped in a separate file with the metadata for the movie. (I din't read the article due to the slashdot effect, but I imagine this is something like that).

  • Not likely at currently then (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jokumuu (831894) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @05:55AM (#11675981)
    If the media has to be specially prepared for this to work, I do not see this taking off currently until the search engine can do the prepping fast and simple from the orginal unprepped media.

  • MirrorDot (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Agret (752467) <alias,zero2097&gmail,com> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @05:58AM (#11675993) Homepage Journal
    loser in front of a computer writes "ZDNet Australia reports that 'Australia's CSIRO research organisation has developed a Firefox plugin named Annodex [mirrordot.org] ? [google.com] that allows browsing through time-continuous media [mirrordot.org] ? [google.com] such as audio and video in the same way that HTML allows browsing through text.' I've just checked Annodex out and it's very cool. The sample video from the Perl conference is way funny too." The catch is, the media to be searched has to be prepped first [mirrordot.org] ? [google.com] ... Full Slashdot Story [mirrordot.org]

  • Read more... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MicroBerto (91055) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:01AM (#11675999)
    Unfortunately, in order to remain loyalty-free, it only supports Ogg Theora. How many of those videos do you see out there? I see none.

    A cool application, nonetheless.

    • Re:Read more... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Agret (752467) <alias,zero2097&gmail,com> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:05AM (#11676010) Homepage Journal
      I got some Anime in ogg once. It was the Rurouni Kenshin OVA. It was such a wonderful format and I could switch between english/jap audio and subs just by right clicking a system tray icon.

      I really wish the Anime community saw it as a viable format rather than using XVid and DivX for everything. OGG is beautiful.

      • Re:Read more... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by phaxkolumbo (572192) <phaxkolumbo@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:34AM (#11676084)

        Now, I might be wrong, but chances are that what you got instead of Ogg Theora compressed files were Ogg Media Files [faireal.net] (.ogm).

        OGM is a container format for audio/video that supports multiple subtitles (just like you mentioned) and multiple audio tracks. From what I personally know, the video is usually compressed with XviD and the audio with Ogg Vorbis.

        (see also Matroska [matroska.org] which does the above, and more)

      • That would be OGM + Ogg Vobis, not Ogg Theora. OGM is a video and audio container like AVI, while Ogg Theora is a video codec (based on VP3 IIRC)
      • There are many containers (which is what your .ogm was, just a container) capable of holding multiple audio streams and soft subtitles.

    • Re:Read more... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well now this is just the thing to get more Ogg Theora videos out there. Annodex provides a reason that one would want to use Ogg.

      Although I guess that might present a chicken/egg situation.

      • Well, in my experience Theora's real strength is low-bitrate encoding. At rates where MPEG would just give up and encode big ugly 8x8 blocks, Theora gives you a very reasonable picture. I once tested and found I could get reasonble quality PDA-sized video at about 160k. Unfortunately, at higher bitrates it seems to really lag behing XviD in quality.

  • I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)

    by earthbound kid (859282) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:07AM (#11676016) Homepage
    Isn't the whole point of time-continuous media to watch it through a continued period of time? Putting hyperlinks into a video just turns your web browser into an improved version of the Sega CD or 3DO. I'll admit this technology has its place, but I wonder how big that place is...
  • We're in Russia doing this for video and audio for years. Will not link to sample, as this is bandwidth consuming.

  • Surely... (Score:4, Informative)

    by FirienFirien (857374) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:18AM (#11676047) Homepage
    'Rewind' and 'fast-forward' already do this? "Time-continuous media" is odd in that it implies something like a stream, yet if the media has to be prepared first, it has to be a complete file. If I could reach the article (seems /. hosed their bandwidth?) I'd check up on this, but:

    The only implication here is that you could skip past part of a stream that exists as a preprepared complete file at the other end (as opposed to radio, which is incomplete and not browsable); but I bet the prepped file is significantly bigger, and the time saved skipping over a boring section would be replaced by the time required to download the extra data.

    Quicktime .mov files also play while still downloading, and work in more browsers than just Firefox; .mov has been around for a while, is already prepped, is easy to convert to with existing programs (free to download) and has various things like crossplatform compatibility.

  • YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by atomic noodle (814905) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:28AM (#11676074)
    Good to see this is open source and works with FireFox, but it's a shame they have to resort to marketing babble and buzzword bingo (see below) to get any media attention for their work. Basically this is YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). They're definitely not the first to do video indexing... search 'VAML', for example.

    Project leader Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, says that the applications of Annodex(TM) are many and varied.

    "Users are discouraged by the complexity of search for clips within vast online multimedia collections. They are demanding a technology that lets them actively search for content," says Dr Pfeiffer.

    "Annodex(TM) and the standards behind it allow them to do just that - it will revolutionise the way we search for time-continuous data. Annodex(TM) also allows video content to be explored using any digitally networked device - including mobile phones, handheld PDAs and digital TV."

    Besides entertainment, Annodex(TM) has many other practical applications such as searching medical information, environmental measurements and network load statistics - on demand."

    The groundbreaking technology behind Annodex(TM) is known as Continuous Media Markup Language (CMML). CMML does for time-continuous media what HTML does for text. It allows the user to search, access, navigate and query.

  • So can anybody tell me is this extension for the integrated Mozilla suite or is it only for the standalone browser Firefox?

  • What is the innovation here? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sonamchauhan (587356) <sonamcNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:34AM (#11676087) Journal
    How is this innovative above a DVD "jump to a scene" menu? (honest question)

    I watched the video, but all it seems to be is a system of sectioning audio-visual files into smaller chunks, and a browser that gives access to a "table of contents" that lets the user jump directly to a section.

    Is the sectioning/table-of-content-generation process automated? It seems to be manual.

    I think software is already available that can partially automate the sectioning of a video. It does this by detecting scene-transitions, and then offering up the "chunks" to the user for approval and labelling. I think such software is used in DVD authoring for generating the "Jump to a Scene" DVD menu.

    • For proper search in rich media, check out a service like www.blinkx.tv, where the audio is transcibed. No reliance on meta-data, and the sectioning is also automated.
      • Wow - thanks for that ... it's a good link. They must have a *lot* of CPU horsepower dedicated to voice recognition to do straight audio transcription for so many channels.

        I wonder what sort of arrangement Blinkx have with content providers in order for users to view content. I wonder if they also search the closed-captions/teletext as Google Video does. (About a year ago, I also intended doing [slashdot.org] something similar as a hobby project.)
      • That was hilarious, looking through some of their 'transcipts':
        Weather report excertp:
        I know this is the way this OS Linux agency lot of clout through northern parts and through eastern parts and you can see how this is this just pushing its weight and keeping eastern parts of Britain but there's no such plan through central and eastern parts he is going to be bringing a lot of snow
        Anether except:
        the coming into force this week in August tested in the courts they sit unworkable and unenforceable and that is
      • Thanks for the reply. Jumping between different streams on different servers is not very different from jumping between different streams on one disk (as in DVDs). Also, I recall Microsoft introducting a standard called web-DVD some years ago to increase the interactivity of DVDs and link them to online content.

        Today, I can listen to streaming audio from an online radio station with Windows media player.
        These stations already section their streams into songs. Media player lets me add individual songs from
        • I got this link [blinkx.tv] from the blinkx.tv site the responder above linked to:

          On page 7:

          Indexing

          blinkx TV uses advanced indexing technology to watch, listen to, and read a video
          or audio signal in real time to build a rich index that you can use to quickly locate
          specific segments within the video content or audio clip. In turn blinkx TV stores
          the information it extracts in metadata tracks in a video index. blinkx TV
          automatically generates metadata tracks to save information generated by the
          media analysis process

  • My favorite thing about stories like this is that creates fertile ground on which to find links for warez to enhance whatever the given program of discussion is. That is the purpose of this thread. Its secondary purpose is to give me some karma, as I am in a whorish mood.

    Allow me to kick it off. The following are links for Firefox browsers only as they will install themselves automagically upon click. You've been warned. A couple of these, I forgot which, install links are for the MS Windows platforms sin

    • LinkPreview sounds interesting, but there is no documentation available over it on mozdev.org. Where did you get more information and that xpi link from? not much here... [mozdev.org]
      • I had to google cache the thing and I eventually got it. Basically, when you load up a page, it checks in with alexa.com and collects any thumbnails the site may have of either the specific page you want to go to or at least the front index of the domain. I think it does this with links as soon as the page is loaded, but it might only do one at a time on the mouseover. To tweak its settings, like the thumbnail server and the thumbnail size, you go to Tools > Extensions > [select it and hit options].

        W

  • Are there any legal restrictions on the indexing of files? I can see a lot of companies becoming upset at having their media prepared in such a way..

  • How it really works (Score:5, Informative)

    by EEproms_Galore (755247) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @07:37AM (#11676241)
    Ive actually seen this in action and most of you are right off track. This isnt a streaming only format nore is it a DVD media replacement. It s a interactive web based media format. Imagine your watching a lecture and during the lecture lest say "Open Source" is mentioned. The author can put a pop up link in the video stream with "Learn more about Open Source" click on the link and you get a short video about open source then it goes back to the main lecture. No getting stuck having to pause the video stream while you look up a term.

  • Could be great for TV news (free and otherwise) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by frostman (302143) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @08:13AM (#11676391) Homepage Journal
    This could be really useful for TV broadcasts, particularly news.

    I think anybody doing closed captioning [robson.org] already has the descriptive content they need. (Others could use a similar process to create it.)

    That info, combined with relatively easily-detectable scene transitions, would make it possible to automate the searchable video file creation to a large extent.

    So the CC or equivalent would still have to be done manually but you'd have this extremely useful, huge searchable archive of video.

    Not so easy for things that depend on the visual content as opposed to the spoken content, but for news it could be amazing.

    Then watch as politicians and captains of industry squirm [ntk.net] at the thought that their every word and twitch is available for searching...
  • https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows &id=451
  • Everything promised is already possible using the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL [w3.org]) standard from W3C.

    What's more SMIL is already [w3.org] supported by Quicktime, Real, MS Media Player, & MS Internet Explorer (& Firefox with some effort).

    For platforms SMIL is available on Linux, Linux/PDA, Windows, Windows CE, MacOS, & MacOS X.

    For content creation numerous SMIL tools are out there, inlcuding most industry standard ones.

    For those curious here's a SMIL tutorial [empirenet.com], in SMIL.

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