[HN Gopher] Show HN: Anno - Effortlessly annotate and comment on...
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       Show HN: Anno - Effortlessly annotate and comment on videos/audio
        
       Author : zackoverflow
       Score  : 99 points
       Date   : 2022-04-09 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (anno.so)
 (TXT) w3m dump (anno.so)
        
       | chaosprint wrote:
       | Very interesting and very good design! Which framework does the
       | website use?
        
         | cryogenicplanet wrote:
         | We use Next, but all the design is done in tailwind
        
       | BlueTemplar wrote:
       | Finally, Anno2022 !
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | zackoverflow wrote:
         | https://anno.so/ZajoaZ8zJbdpATREt9qGW
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | rememberlenny wrote:
       | This looks very nice and the YouTube/Loom integration is very
       | nice.
       | 
       | What target user group are you aiming to serve? Given the number
       | of video tools in the past two years, I find that the vertical
       | served largely determines what features are most valuable.
        
         | cryogenicplanet wrote:
         | Right now we have a couple of user groups in mind:
         | 
         | - We've been using it internal for more detailed product
         | feedback on looms where we can draw and give some feedback to
         | our eng team - We've seen users using this for music feedback,
         | sending drafts of songs to give feedback on before publishing
         | them - Finally we've see a use case similar to frame.io,
         | essentially a lighter weight, less enterprise version of frame
        
       | zackoverflow wrote:
       | Hey HN, I'm one of the founders of Modfy.video - we just shipped
       | Anno.so which lets you add timestamped comments and annotations
       | (drawings, scribbles, notes) to videos & other media files.
       | 
       | We currently use it to add comments and markup to Loom videos
       | about dev problems we share among our engineering team, it's been
       | a great help.
       | 
       | Anno.so supports uploaded videos, audio, YouTube videos, Loom
       | videos, SoundCloud audio. It's free to use with no sign-up
       | required.
       | 
       | This is a project we spun out from a video editor we're currently
       | working on https://modfy.video if interested.
        
         | rbarragan wrote:
         | Hey OP great work. I'm curious on the metrics and statistics,
         | how much of people that consume media, use annotation? How's
         | the impact?
        
           | zackoverflow wrote:
           | Thanks! It's less about those that consume and more about the
           | creation process, giving feedback/thoughts while working on a
           | video or a song.
           | 
           | Also we use it internally to share looms with our eng team,
           | where we leverage timestamped comments and annotations to
           | enhance the sharing and discussion of ideas
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | shimonabi wrote:
       | I've been looking for desktop software to make comments/bookmarks
       | on audio files for a while. Does anyone know something like this?
       | 
       | VLC is inadequate and I'm tired of manually adding timestamps to
       | Notepad.
        
         | blipmusic wrote:
         | https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan
         | 
         | This is almost certainly overkill for what you're looking for
         | since it's really intended for researchers (think linguistic
         | transcriptions etc), but any kind of annotation goes really,
         | even if you're only tagging whenever the color green is visible
         | in a video or the sound of a rooster in an audio recording.
         | 
         | Format is XML:
         | https://www.mpi.nl/tools/elan/EAF_Annotation_Format_3.0_and_...
         | There's a python library for parsing outside of ELAN:
         | https://github.com/dopefishh/pympi
        
         | cryogenicplanet wrote:
         | I'm curious why you wouldn't want to use it on the web?
         | 
         | And would you be interested in us shipping this with something
         | like Tauri (https://tauri.studio)?
        
       | mzur wrote:
       | Is it open source or are there plans to make it so? I'd be very
       | interested how you do frame-accurate video annotations in the
       | browser, as I found the currentTime attribute of HTML video
       | elements to be too unreliable for this. (Context: I maintain a
       | video annotation tool that is mostly used for marine imaging.)
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | zackoverflow wrote:
         | For Anno we are using HTML video elements / YouTube embeds
         | which have the same frame inaccuracy from currentTime. For our
         | editor we have a WebGL-based solution that seems to get better
         | frame granularity but still has some floating point rounding
         | errors converting frames <-> seconds
         | 
         | There's also requestVideoFrameCallback() and seekToNextFrame()
         | in the Web APIs but they are still experimental/not supported
         | by all browser. The WebCodecs API is also experimental/not
         | supported to all browsers but would allow you to decode and
         | grab the individual frames from a video and draw them to a
         | canvas
        
         | bjano wrote:
         | In Chrome and Edge you can use WebCodecs to decode and display
         | video frames one-by-one. (this is what I used for the video
         | editor at https://vidmix.app )
         | 
         | In other browsers you could build FFmpeg with webassembly and
         | use that for frame-by-frame decoding but it's not going to be
         | nearly as performant.
        
           | mzur wrote:
           | Decoding the video manually seems so much overkill when all
           | that's needed would essentially be a currentFrame property.
           | But it seems I have to explore this avenue as well. I only
           | aim to support Chrome and Firefox but as much as I hate to
           | admit it, Firefox is somewhat lacking on the video side
           | anyway (as there is a bug that lets it display different
           | video frames for the same currentTime than other browsers or
           | FFmpeg [1]). Therefore I already discourage using Firefox for
           | video annotation.
           | 
           | [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735300
        
             | bjano wrote:
             | Yes, the shortcomings of the html video tag are quite
             | unfortunate. Just some very small improvements would make
             | it a lot more useful. One other issue I found at the time I
             | was looking at it (not sure if it's still the case) was
             | that stepping one frame forward wasn't any faster than
             | seeking from a random location. Seemed like the video was
             | decoded from the last keyframe every time, making it
             | inefficient to iterate through the frames.
        
         | SpectralName wrote:
         | > Context: I maintain a video annotation tool that is mostly
         | used for marine imaging.
         | 
         | Which one, out of curiosity? I'm just starting to look into
         | this space and interested in knowing what's out there.
        
       | nonoesp wrote:
       | Recently came across Dropbox Replay which seems to target a
       | similar user base.
       | 
       | https://www.dropbox.com/replay
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | mattrighetti wrote:
       | This reminds me a lot of SoundCloud's comments at a specific time
       | in the audio, cool!
        
       | avh3 wrote:
       | Some time ago, I've build an MVP around the exact same idea
       | (although without the audio tagging). It's also free to use, and
       | can be found at https://proofing.io
       | 
       | I can tell you up front, nobody seems interested in the
       | 'annotations' part (drawing on the video). Only text notes seem
       | to be used. Of course, this is only a limited view from our side.
       | Maybe you guys see different results.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | asiachick wrote:
         | different cultures
         | 
         | https://www.nicovideo.jp/
         | 
         | Description: A popular site where users can add floating
         | comments above the video at specific times.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niconico
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-09 23:01 UTC)