Project Showcase

Howard Huges Medical Institute Lectures

Project Brief
To enable students to search and to watch on their computers the complete set of seasonal holiday lectures organised by and given at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
 
Execution
The HHMI lectures archive was produced using the Doovle channel creation platform. It also uses Doovle's soundtrack search technology which makes it possible for users to search for words and phrases that occur in any of the video lectures and to watch matched scenes immediately.

 
Background
The annual Holliday Lectures at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute span subjects including genetics, evolution, genomics, RNA, stem cells, and cancer. Previously, each season of lectures has been distributed on DVD HHMI students and students at other US universities.
 
Technical
Quicktime streaming server was selected and all final streamable video was encoded in H.264 hinted .MOV with video bitrate of 512kbps and a 4x3 dimension of 512x384 pixels. This smaller video window fomat was chosen to give very sharp picture quality and there was no requirement for full-screen display.
 
All the lectures were professionally captioned when they were first put onto DVD. We used our subtitle extraction software to take the captions from the DVD data structures (as bitmaps) and convert them to textual SRT format (by OCR) for direct import into our video search engine.