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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.
the implications for porn surfing are mind numbing.
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.
Already slashdotted? anyone got a mirror of annodex.net??
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
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 ? ... Full Slashdot Story
Have you metaroderated recently?
A cool application, nonetheless.
Berto
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.
'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:
.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.
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
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
What this plugin seems to do is already found in a DVD, except this adds search capabilites.
The search feature is kinda the only thing that is making this stand out, but since it only supports one format, and that the media seems to need to "manually" prepped is a huge drawback.
To sum it up, this plugin is basically: a table of contents, a closed caption text search, and the "scene select" menu in a DVD.
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.
So can anybody tell me is this extension for the integrated Mozilla suite or is it only for the standalone browser Firefox?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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.
there was no bandwidth a that time ;)
A quick epistomological sidenote: what's the opposite of time-continuous media?! All media records an instance of time, whether it's 1 ms or 10 seconds.
Ok I'm being a pedantic asshole I admit it
Nothing costs nothing
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 since most of you suckers use Windows even though this site is about Linux leetness.
Autocopy saves you from having to hit ctrl+c to copy highlighted text, sort of like most remote terminal programs and irc clients
DictionarySearch will allow you get dictionary.com definitions in a new background tab by highlighting a word, right clicking it, and in the menu you can hit Dictionary Search for "triskaidekaphobia"
Adblock
should be self-explanatory.
This one will identify the current US Homeland Security terrorism threat level with a small colored box in the status bar (fun for showing off to get IE users to make the switch)
Stock ticker. When putting in your symbols, here are a few symbols for some indices: ^NDX (nasdaq), ^DJI (dow jones industrial average), ^GSPC for the S&P 500
LinkPreview will pop up thumbnail preview images [most of the time] when you mouseover a link. Frickin awesome. Requires restart.
Time to stop and hit submit before this article gets too many posts so that I may maximize karma intake :). Please reply with links to your own favorite plugins/extensions.
Yours, Douglas Simmons
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.
it is US companies that charge other countries for all inbound traffic...
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..
Best regards, A.C.
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.
Ok, I shall take Prometheun task on me to review all pron. So please snail mail all DVD's and other recordable media to me that contains it. I will send it back after I'm done with it..
This could be really useful for TV broadcasts, particularly news.
I think anybody doing closed captioning 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 at the thought that their every word and twitch is available for searching...
This Like That - fun with words!
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows &id=451
Virage (part of Autonomy) does some cool stuff
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
it is already possible with quicktime for many years... but there is no free wysiwyg tool to do that, however = you can do that with QuickTime API and then play movie with QuickTime Player...
It's already being done for music files by simply using zip compression. See here. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3602
thats great,
we do similar things, but with proprietary technology...
actually our implementation of interactive films (or structured video) goes beyond that and allows to link video with any additional information type.
also we've explored back in 2001-2002 almost all the applications of this technology and made a bunch of samples of various kinds.
What's more SMIL is already 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, in SMIL.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Correction:
...I also want to use that space as efficiently as possible.
Don't fret though, most Americans (assuming you are a non-American trying to learn English, though I could be wrong) can't use adverbs either.
I could swear I gave a talk on something very similar back in 2000 at ACM Hypertext. The OvalTine project at UNC (no, don't ask, it was a silly name) allowed a user to markup video by tracking faces/heads automatically from frame to frame, and attaching a URL to them once. (You could also attach URLs to any other object in the video stream, but the object tracker we had running best at that time was for heads.) Clicking on any object that was so tagged would pop up a browser window (or the appropriate application if it was a 'file:' URL opening a local document).
Since we did this in QuickTime, it also supported jumping within the video stream, or to other video streams via timecodes. The same file format is now MPEG-4... so why on earth didn't these folks just use that? That way, the link information is embedded directly in the movie file, no external files are necessary. They tend to get lost, after all. Any reasonable MPEG-4 player would then be able to be used, it would be using an open standard file format, and they would be showered with admiration for making the process much easier.
Or am I missing something critical?
The catch is, the media to be searched has to be prepped first.
Holy fuck, that's just like saying text files have to be "prepped" before they can be part of a global hypertext system.
Dear god, whatever shall we do.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
ok, i got trolled.... maybe, I just havent mastered the skillz to get first post correctly, or maybe i just plain old mucked up.... sorry guys.
~~bada bing, bada bang, bada bong and voila~~
I, for one, welcome our new Multimedia Hyperlinked World Video Web Overlords.
I suggest to call them WiVi.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
stop modding this guy troll because you dont like the joke in his sig
Searching anything on the server requires the server to index it beforehand, or parse it in realtime. The client can't actually search the content unless it downloads it. There's little economy in every client downloading all the content in the archive just to search it for a fragment. No matter how much bandwidth and storage (except near-infinite), and much economy in searching at the server, where the data is stored (even in a distributed network, like BitTorrent). And the copyright control, as well as user-access metadata, is much better modelled in a third-party server. If data is indexed as it's stored, it just doesn't make a difference. So this architecture is as optimal as it will get, regardless of bandwidth.
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make install -not war
I've looked through the docs included in the docs, and the website seems Slashdotted. In what kind of parameters is the index produced? That is, what kinds of questions can a searcher ask of the index? Like audio tempo/BPM, or style signatures (pitches/rhythms), or some other human-recognizable values? I don't expect it can search for semantics, like "find the songs with the words 'darling' and 'chainlink' in this directory". Once indexed, in what kinds of nonexpert terms can the content be searched?
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make install -not war
After digging through the painfully slow website (how do they expect to serve media files?), it looks like Annodex is kinda BS. I see no evidence of meaningful analysis of the data for searching - just ways to visualize the same old DSP of time/spectrum power data. And the Annodex format itself is just a metadata interleave format that lets you insert the XML you create by hand into the video, with a detailed timecode URI format for fragments. So what? HTTP does byte-range requests, so I can index my own content by timecode right now, and keep a database of metadata keyed to timecodes. Then return a fragment of the blob at the timecode. All without Annodex. I should have known, when they referred to media blobs as exotic "dark matter on the Internet" that this project was just blowing smoke. Unless there's some magic feature-detection in the indexer hiding behind some timed-out webpage. Anyone else find anything actually worthwhile to this press release?
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make install -not war
That's with external input from the real world, via cameras and mics. TV shows are likely to have well recorded audio, clear well-lit closeups of faces, follow conventions of shot composition etc.
Then there's other things that can be examined: the number of colours could distinguish anime from film, the amount of audio compression / background noise etc.
I imagine the best way to do it would be using a neural net approach. Get someone to sit with the computer and play human-categorised content to it all day, and let the software infer the rules of genre incrementally.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
"it only supports Ogg Theora."
"Much as the W3C recommends the royalty and patent free image compression formats PNG and JPEG, Annodex.net recommends the use of royalty and patent free audio and video codecs."
Recommends. As in does not require. Unless I'm missing something. Even if it doesn't support other formats I'm sure it will be hacked to do so shortly, seeing as the source is available and it's under a BSD-style license.