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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.

18 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. astonishing by rich42 · · Score: 5, Funny

    the implications for porn surfing are mind numbing.

    1. Re:astonishing by cgranade · · Score: 3, Funny

      Mayhaps this will join the Pornzilla project.

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      #define DRM chmod 000

  2. 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 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.

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      []'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins

      ^[:wq

  3. 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 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)

    2. Re:Not likely at currently then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

  4. 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?
  5. 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.

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    Berto
    1. Re:Read more... by Agret · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Have you metaroderated recently?
    2. Re:Read more... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

    3. 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)

  6. 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...

  7. Surely... by FirienFirien · · Score: 4, Informative

    '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.

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    Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
  8. 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.

  9. What is the innovation here? by sonamchauhan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. How it really works by EEproms_Galore · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. Could be great for TV news (free and otherwise) by frostman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

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