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by declandewet 4186 days ago
Yes, that would be cool. I am curious as to how such a search would be performed by the user. Perhaps entering a duration in minutes and seconds and using arrow keys to shift the buffer bar location left/right until the correct scene is found, or searching for known dialog text and mapping transcript to location in the video that that specific part of the transcript was said in dialog might be a useful addition to the already-available "thumbnail search" most video players provide today (when you hover over the loading bar, a thumbnail image of that scene appears in a tooltip).

Something useful I've seen in very few places are video players that maintain a history of the duration of the video that was watched, so if the internet ever cuts out or the video stops loading the page could just be reloaded and the duration in the video will be maintained, albeit 1 minute prior just as a quick recap of what happened. When this feature is not available, and the connection is shoddy, watching videos can be very frustrating because having to find where you were previously can sometimes take ages, especially if the loading bar has no indication of what duration in minutes the video is at the location you hover your mouse on the loading bar.

What else other than this could add any real value to the act of searching a video? Perhaps mapping words to visual cues, for example searching "helicopter explosion" would take you directly to an overdramatic scene of a helicopter being blown up in magnificent ember by a missile that is clearly too small to do much damage to a bicycle let alone a helicopter, that would be cool.

1 comments

You bring up some interesting concepts on how to "search a video". Great ideas. My initial thought was to have segments tagged, with phrases / keywords.