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Firefox Plugin Annodex For Searching Audio, Video

Posted by timothy on from the well-lookie-and-hearie-here dept.

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.

12 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Of course by shreevatsa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Of course by jokumuu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Of course by bogado · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

      ^[:wq

  2. Not likely at currently then by jokumuu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Not likely at currently then by Agret · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How could a computer possibly work out what media is sports or music videos or anime or tv shows or whatever. We need a new format like WMV (It contains XML type things in it) with XML wrapped inside that can be extracted and read that contains proper Genre and Category and such. I think WMV has this but it's not compulsury and doesn't get used often. If these formats were to take off then I could see this happening.

      --
      Have you metaroderated recently?
    2. Re:Not likely at currently then by luvirini · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Yes indeed that is the core of the problem, in order to search something, the search algoritm has to understand the content to be searched.

      Currently trying to get a computer to understand something in pictures, even less in motion pictures is very inaccurate and extremly prosessor intensive, unless one uses a really small subset(like fingerprint recognition)

  3. MirrorDot by Agret · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?
  4. Read more... by MicroBerto · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Berto
    1. Re:Read more... by phaxkolumbo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Now, I might be wrong, but chances are that what you got instead of Ogg Theora compressed files were Ogg Media Files (.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 which does the above, and more)

    2. Re:Read more... by Buzzard2501 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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)

      --
      Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
  5. I dunno by earthbound+kid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  6. YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) by atomic+noodle · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.