How Does It Work?
We answer this fully in our technology section. Briefly, we create a search engine index of all the words in the soundtrack of a video, usually based on existing subtitle data, so that our search engine can then match words that are searched for to specific timepoints within one or more videos at which the matched words occur. We then stream the requested matched video scenes using accurate timepoint playing.
What Is TimePoint Playing?
This is playing a selected video and causing it to start playing immediately at a specified timepoint. Usually we set the timepoint for playing a matched scene from our video search engine at 5 seconds before the matched word or words are actually said. This can only be achieved with genuine streaming.
What About Progressively Downloaded Video?
For video that is just served as a file from a normal web server, there is no way (with current web browsers and video player plugins) to move the player's playhead to an arbitrary starting point without first downloading the whole video file up to that chosen start time. It is technically possible with the right HTTP protocol calls but most browser developers have not implemented this.
How Is Your Video Search So Accurate?
It is accurate because we ensure that the source subtitle or closed caption or transcript data that we work with is accurate to begin with and we synchronise the timings in the textual soundtrack index with the soundtracks in the actual videos we stream.
Do You Do Automated Speech-To-Text Conversion?
No. While we have great admiration for companies like Blinkx that have successfully indexed millions of hours of video on the web, we don't operate in that space. Our expertise is in making isolated and finite collections of video searchable to our customers' end users with great accuracy and in then serving the video scenes that match each search at very high streaming quality.
I Can Search For A "Tobogganing Dog" At YouTube - What's The Big Deal?
It is one thing to search the meta data (title, description, keywords) associated with a video asset, especially short videos, but quite another to search inside video for specific scenes to watch. Our video search is not needed for short form video but it is essential, we think, for helping impatient users find the exact scenes they want to watch in large collections of video.
What If My Video Has No Captions?
In the absence of accurate subtitle or caption data, we can take a textual transcript of a video and segment it, effectively turning the transcript text into a subtitle data format but with rather long lines. We can synchronise each 60 second segment of transcript to the correct timepoints in the original video soundtrack and at least achieve an accuracy to the nearest minute or less. In many cases, this is perfectly sufficient.
What If I Don't Have A Transcript?
We can provide you with an online video tagging application to enable you to run through your video content very quickly and save your own scene description "tags" against relevant timepoints in the videos. Our assisted tagging solutions are similar in function to professional subtitling software so we take care of all the timing information. All you have to do is tag your videos with sufficiently useful descriptions of their content.
What Languages Does Your Video Search Engine Support?
We typically work with the same language as is present in the source video soundtrack and we prefer to work with the HOH (Hard Of Hearing, same language) subtitle data. We support all Roman languages but we don't have experience with non-Roman character set languages (Cyrillic, Hebrew, Kanji etc.)
What Video Formats Do You Support?
We can support any streamed video format, provided the streaming server can accept a "start-time" parameter. With Flash Streaming Server, we recommend H.264 MP4 streaming and also On2 FLV. With Quicktime Streaming Server, we recommend H.264 hinted MOV video. We can also work with Windows Media Streaming and WMV9 video but we do not offer WMV streaming via our own servers.
Do You Provide API Access To The Video Search Engine?
Yes. If we are hosting a video search engine for content owners with existing streaming services, we will provide and API with detailed documentation to enable our video search engine to be integrated with a remotely hosted video collection. See our custom video search apps section for more information.
To talk to us about incorporating our video search into your business, please email us: sales@doovle.com.
|
