Search, Access, Navigate and Query Video Clips with FireFox’s New Plugin
Australia’s CSIRO research organization has released a ground breaking technology for delivering indexed video content. Annodex search tool provides actual video content with detailed summaries, interactivity through video, and hyperlinks to additional material. CMML is the dubbed name behind Annodex, and it allows for website to be constructed using video instead of text. This open source technology is free for download and is currently available in Debian GNU/Linux.
The CSIRO has dubbed the technology behind Annodex Continuous Media Markup Language, or CMML. According to the organisation, “CMML does for time-continuous media what HTML does for text. It allows the user to search, access, navigate and query”.
Project leader Dr Silvia Pfeiffer told ZDNet Australia this morning that the reason the organisation chose Firefox as a development platform over Internet Explorer (IE) was the fact that Firefox’s plugin architecture was easier to work with and the browser was supported across several platforms. The CSIRO had initially tried to develop Annodex for IE, but found that Microsoft’s browser had numerous security holes.
Currently the software only supports playback of media webs that are encoded using the open source Ogg Theora (for video) and Ogg Vorbis (for audio) codecs. Pfeiffer said that the choice to use the Ogg codecs was based on the need for Annodex to be royalty-free and available to all users. In contrast, formats such as MPEG2 or MPEG4 have licences that “have to be paid for”. In addition, according to Pfeiffer, while Theora does not have as high a compression ration as MPEG4, it is “quality wise as good as the MPEG2 format,” and only “one level of quality behind the top-level compression codecs”.
Checkout the CSIRO website to try the technology for yourself.
February 14th, 2005 at 9:11 am
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