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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.

11 of 129 comments (clear)

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

    the implications for porn surfing are mind numbing.

  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.

      --
      []'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. 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 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 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)

  5. 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.

    --
    Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
  6. 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.