Firefox Plugin Annodex For Searching Audio, Video

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.

Re:Read more...

[Agret]

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...

[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.

Re:Not likely at currently then

[Anonymous Coward]

How could a computer possibly work out what media is sports or music videos or anime or tv shows or whatever.
That sounds like a doctorate in the making... I'd anticipate an 80% hit rate in genre classification (at least) within 6 months of research, just given those sorts of categories. It's just image recogition and classification, really, but with a fscking huge dataset (which is a good thing).

interactive film

[iddi]

We're in Russia doing this for video and audio for years. Will not link to sample, as this is bandwidth consuming.

moreover

[iddi]

it can be prepped in realtime and published online along with the event and uses anything as output video format.

composition tools are not yet available for the general public.

Slashdotted...damn!

[EzInKy]

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?

[sonamchauhan]

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.

Re:What is the innovation here?

[Anonymous Coward]

One difference is, you can jump into a different video, on the same or a different server, not just other places in the same one.

Or you can search and get links directly into a specific position in a video. eg. With this search engine
http://labs.panopticsearch.com/search/sear ch.cgi?c ollection=labs.cmweb

The section/TOC generation is manual. However in theory it could be automated using scene-detection and speech to text. But you can consider that as part of the original authoring process.

Real innovation

[montmorency77]

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.

Legal implications?

[Anonymous Cumshot]

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..

Could be great for TV news (free and otherwise)

[frostman]

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...

Re:What is the innovation here?

[Anonymous Coward]

The innovation is more that we're going with the Web's model of finding information: i.e., hyperlinks. The capability for hyperlinking is sort-of present in lots of media formats, but we're really the first to advocate it as the future way of putting videos on the Web.

Additionally, the "freeform" annotation of the video serves very well for searching: it enables marking up a video in a way that's very meaningful for people. Try out the YAPC video on the example web there to see what I mean. The annotations are quite different from subtitles or closed captioning texts, and the hyperlinks allow you to dig deeper for information if you're interested in what the video is talking about. We're trying to make video a "first-class citizen" on the Web: when you can hyperlinking to specific time points inside video and out of the video to other Web content, video becomes part of the whole Web experience, rather than just a cool thing that you need to download some plugins to view.

This post [csiro.au] hits the nail on the head.

- Andre (one of the Annodex developers)

SMIL already does this, and is widespread

[maggard]

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.

Re:Of course

[bogado]

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).