This document contains supplemental material for the GSoC 2008 projects proposed by me (Stjepan Rajko). I have prepared two overlapping project proposals for Google Summer of Code 2008:

• Easing user upload of video for use with MetaVidWiki, submitted to Wikimedia Foundation.
• Enabling efficent annotation of archive.org hosted videos through MetaVidWiki, submitted to Internet Archive.

At this time, this page contains some basic studies related to the use of externally hosted video:

This is the FlowPlayer version used by the archive.org website:

This is the latest version of FlowPlayer accessed from their site, used on the same archive.org-hosted clip:

Note that the latest FlowPlayer API supports everything we need to control and monitor playback for the purposes of MetaVidWiki.

Click Me -> Annotation 1 (0:10-0:20)

Click Me -> Annotation 2 (0:30-0:40)

The recently released YouTube scripting API offers similar functionality.

I am currently experimenting with the example posted here, which shows how to retreive a specified portion of a .flv file.

Below is a version of the same file shown above that has been preprocessed with flvmdi and read using a PHP player. You can scrub through the file without waiting for the seek position to be downloaded (grab and drag the scrubber).

Note that the above approach is intrusive to the file - it requires it to be preprocessed by flvmdi. In the below example, the metadata is extracted from the preprocessed file, while the video comes from the original video file. This shows that it is possible to extract the required position metadata from the original file, store it somewhere else, and use the information to optimally seek the original file without modifying it:

The sources for these examples can be found here.

Thanks to Michael Dale of MetaVidWiki for pointing me in an incredible number of right directions, which made me understand the problem domain enough to write a proposal. Thanks also to Silvia Pfeiffer of Annodex for pointing me to MetaVidWiki.

Credits also go to Andre Wilson for creating the movie that was used in the examples above (Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)