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Des sites réalisés avec MediaSPIP
2 mai 2011, parCette page présente quelques-uns des sites fonctionnant sous MediaSPIP.
Vous pouvez bien entendu ajouter le votre grâce au formulaire en bas de page. -
Ajouter notes et légendes aux images
7 février 2011, parPour pouvoir ajouter notes et légendes aux images, la première étape est d’installer le plugin "Légendes".
Une fois le plugin activé, vous pouvez le configurer dans l’espace de configuration afin de modifier les droits de création / modification et de suppression des notes. Par défaut seuls les administrateurs du site peuvent ajouter des notes aux images.
Modification lors de l’ajout d’un média
Lors de l’ajout d’un média de type "image" un nouveau bouton apparait au dessus de la prévisualisation (...) -
Automated installation script of MediaSPIP
25 avril 2011, parTo overcome the difficulties mainly due to the installation of server side software dependencies, an "all-in-one" installation script written in bash was created to facilitate this step on a server with a compatible Linux distribution.
You must have access to your server via SSH and a root account to use it, which will install the dependencies. Contact your provider if you do not have that.
The documentation of the use of this installation script is available here.
The code of this (...)
Sur d’autres sites (5890)
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Tap to record like in vine using javacv
8 décembre 2015, par human123I am trying to implement a tap to record feature like in vine. A sample for handling recording (not touch to record) provided in javacv is https://github.com/bytedeco/javacv/blob/master/samples/RecordActivity.java. I am trying to modify it so that in onPreviewFrame method frames are added to buffer only when user has his finger placed on screen. These frames are then tried to be combined into final video in stopRecording method.
The issue is that if I set the timestamp as given in below code snippet (in stopRecording method)
if (t > recorder.getTimestamp())
{
recorder.setTimestamp(t);
}the behavior is as below
Case 1
If I tap on screen to record for 2 seconds and take the finger away from screen for 3 seconds and then again place finger back on screen to record for another 4 seconds the resulting video is like,
For 1st 2 seconds video has recorded content. For next 3 seconds (time when finger is put away from screen). video just shows the last frame recorded when finger was placed on screen last. Then the video has recorded video content for next 4 seconds. So there seems to be an issue in handling video recording when finger is removed from screen.
Case 2
Next I removed the code setting time stamp to recorder(the code snippet given above) in stopRecording method.
Now the resulting video (for the same steps tried in case 1) does not contain the middle 3 seconds(which is what is required) when finger was taken away from screen. But video is playing at a faster rate. So it seems that we need to set time stamp so that video plays at normal rate.
Full code of my activity is given below. (Please note that video recording is mainly handled from onPreviewFrame and stopRecording methods)
public class TouchToRecordActivity extends Activity implements OnClickListener, View.OnTouchListener {
private final static String CLASS_LABEL = "TouchToRecordActivity";
private final static String LOG_TAG = CLASS_LABEL;
private String ffmpeg_link = "/mnt/sdcard/stream.mp4";
long startTime = 0;
boolean recording = false;
boolean rec = false;
private FFmpegFrameRecorder recorder;
private boolean isPreviewOn = false;
private int sampleAudioRateInHz = 44100;
private int imageWidth = 640;
private int imageHeight = 480;
private int destWidth = 480;
private int frameRate = 30;
/* audio data getting thread */
private AudioRecord audioRecord;
private AudioRecordRunnable audioRecordRunnable;
private Thread audioThread;
volatile boolean runAudioThread = true;
/* video data getting thread */
private Camera cameraDevice;
private CameraView cameraView;
private Frame yuvImage = null;
/* layout setting */
private final int bg_screen_bx = 232;
private final int bg_screen_by = 128;
private final int bg_screen_width = 700;
private final int bg_screen_height = 500;
private final int bg_width = 1123;
private final int bg_height = 715;
private final int live_width = 640;
private final int live_height = 480;
private int screenWidth, screenHeight;
private Button btnRecorderControl;
/* The number of seconds in the continuous record loop (or 0 to disable loop). */
final int RECORD_LENGTH = 20;
Frame[] images;
long[] timestamps;
ShortBuffer[] samples;
int imagesIndex, samplesIndex;
long firstTime = 0;
long startPauseTime = 0;
long totalPauseTime = 0;
long pausedTime = 0;
long stopPauseTime = 0;
long totalTime = 0;
long totalRecordedTS = 0;
private TextView txtTimer;
private Handler mHandler = new Handler();
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE);
setContentView(R.layout.touch_main);
initLayout();
}
@Override
protected void onDestroy() {
super.onDestroy();
recording = false;
if (cameraView != null) {
cameraView.stopPreview();
}
if (cameraDevice != null) {
cameraDevice.stopPreview();
cameraDevice.release();
cameraDevice = null;
}
}
private void initLayout() {
/* get size of screen */
Display display = ((WindowManager) getSystemService(Context.WINDOW_SERVICE)).getDefaultDisplay();
screenWidth = display.getWidth();
screenHeight = display.getHeight();
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams layoutParam = null;
LayoutInflater myInflate = null;
myInflate = (LayoutInflater) getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE);
RelativeLayout topLayout = new RelativeLayout(this);
setContentView(topLayout);
LinearLayout preViewLayout = (LinearLayout) myInflate.inflate(R.layout.touch_main, null);
layoutParam = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(screenWidth, screenHeight);
topLayout.addView(preViewLayout, layoutParam);
txtTimer = (TextView) preViewLayout.findViewById(R.id.txtTimer);
/* add control button: start and stop */
btnRecorderControl = (Button) findViewById(R.id.recorder_control);
btnRecorderControl.setText("Start");
btnRecorderControl.setOnClickListener(this);
/* add camera view */
int display_width_d = (int) (1.0 * bg_screen_width * screenWidth / bg_width);
int display_height_d = (int) (1.0 * bg_screen_height * screenHeight / bg_height);
int prev_rw, prev_rh;
if (1.0 * display_width_d / display_height_d > 1.0 * live_width / live_height) {
prev_rh = display_height_d;
prev_rw = (int) (1.0 * display_height_d * live_width / live_height);
} else {
prev_rw = display_width_d;
prev_rh = (int) (1.0 * display_width_d * live_height / live_width);
}
layoutParam = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(prev_rw, prev_rh);
layoutParam.topMargin = (int) (1.0 * bg_screen_by * screenHeight / bg_height);
layoutParam.leftMargin = (int) (1.0 * bg_screen_bx * screenWidth / bg_width);
cameraDevice = Camera.open();
Log.i(LOG_TAG, "cameara open");
cameraView = new CameraView(this, cameraDevice);
topLayout.addView(cameraView, layoutParam);
topLayout.setOnTouchListener(this);
Log.i(LOG_TAG, "cameara preview start: OK");
}
//---------------------------------------
// initialize ffmpeg_recorder
//---------------------------------------
private void initRecorder() {
Log.w(LOG_TAG, "init recorder");
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
imagesIndex = 0;
images = new Frame[RECORD_LENGTH * frameRate];
timestamps = new long[images.length];
for (int i = 0; i < images.length; i++) {
images[i] = new Frame(destWidth, imageHeight, Frame.DEPTH_UBYTE, 2);
timestamps[i] = -1;
}
} else if (yuvImage == null) {
yuvImage = new Frame(destWidth, imageHeight, Frame.DEPTH_UBYTE, 2);
Log.i(LOG_TAG, "create yuvImage");
}
Log.i(LOG_TAG, "ffmpeg_url: " + ffmpeg_link);
recorder = new FFmpegFrameRecorder(ffmpeg_link, destWidth, imageHeight, 1);
recorder.setFormat("mp4");
recorder.setVideoCodecName("libx264");
recorder.setSampleRate(sampleAudioRateInHz);
// Set in the surface changed method
recorder.setFrameRate(frameRate);
Log.i(LOG_TAG, "recorder initialize success");
audioRecordRunnable = new AudioRecordRunnable();
audioThread = new Thread(audioRecordRunnable);
runAudioThread = true;
}
public void startRecording() {
initRecorder();
mHandler.removeCallbacks(mUpdateTimeTask);
mHandler.postDelayed(mUpdateTimeTask, 100);
try {
recorder.start();
startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
recording = true;
audioThread.start();
} catch (FFmpegFrameRecorder.Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
public void stopRecording() {
runAudioThread = false;
try {
audioThread.join();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
audioRecordRunnable = null;
audioThread = null;
if (recorder != null && recording) {
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "Writing frames");
try {
int firstIndex = imagesIndex % samples.length;
int lastIndex = (imagesIndex - 1) % images.length;
if (imagesIndex <= images.length) {
firstIndex = 0;
lastIndex = imagesIndex - 1;
}
if ((startTime = timestamps[lastIndex] - RECORD_LENGTH * 1000000L) < 0) {
startTime = 0;
}
if (lastIndex < firstIndex) {
lastIndex += images.length;
}
int videoCounter = 0;
for (int i = firstIndex; i <= lastIndex; i++) {
if (timestamps[i] == -1) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "frame not recorded");
}
if (timestamps[i] != -1) {
long t = timestamps[i % timestamps.length] - startTime;
if (t >= 0) {
videoCounter++;
/*if (((i % images.length) != 0) && images[i % images.length] != images[(i % images.length) - 1]) {
if (t > recorder.getTimestamp()) {
recorder.setTimestamp(t);
}*/
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "imageIndex=" + (i % images.length));
recorder.record(images[i % images.length]);
/* }*/
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "videoCounter=" + videoCounter);
}
}
}
firstIndex = samplesIndex % samples.length;
lastIndex = (samplesIndex - 1) % samples.length;
if (samplesIndex <= samples.length) {
firstIndex = 0;
lastIndex = samplesIndex - 1;
}
if (lastIndex < firstIndex) {
lastIndex += samples.length;
}
for (int i = firstIndex; i <= lastIndex; i++) {
if (timestamps[i] != -1) {
recorder.recordSamples(samples[i % samples.length]);
}
}
} catch (FFmpegFrameRecorder.Exception e) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
recording = false;
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "Finishing recording, calling stop and release on recorder");
try {
recorder.stop();
recorder.release();
} catch (FFmpegFrameRecorder.Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
recorder = null;
}
}
@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK) {
if (recording) {
stopRecording();
}
finish();
return true;
}
return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}
@Override
public boolean onTouch(View view, MotionEvent motionEvent) {
switch (motionEvent.getAction()) {
case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN:
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "ACTION_DOWN" + recording);
if (!recording) {
startRecording();
} else {
stopPauseTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
totalPauseTime = stopPauseTime - startPauseTime - ((long) (1.0 / (double) frameRate) * 1000);
pausedTime += totalPauseTime;
}
rec = true;
setTotalVideoTime();
btnRecorderControl.setText(getResources().getString(R.string.stop));
break;
case MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE:
rec = true;
setTotalVideoTime();
break;
case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP:
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "ACTION_UP");
rec = false;
startPauseTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
break;
}
return true;
}
private Runnable mUpdateTimeTask = new Runnable() {
public void run() {
if (recording) {
setTotalVideoTime();
}
mHandler.postDelayed(this, 500);
}
};
private synchronized void setTotalVideoTime() {
totalTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - firstTime - pausedTime - ((long) (1.0 / (double) frameRate) * 1000);
if (totalTime > 0)
txtTimer.setText(getRecordingTimeFromMillis(totalTime));
}
private String getRecordingTimeFromMillis(long millis) {
String strRecordingTime = null;
int seconds = (int) (millis / 1000);
int minutes = seconds / 60;
int hours = minutes / 60;
if (hours >= 0 && hours < 10)
strRecordingTime = "0" + hours + ":";
else
strRecordingTime = hours + ":";
if (hours > 0)
minutes = minutes % 60;
if (minutes >= 0 && minutes < 10)
strRecordingTime += "0" + minutes + ":";
else
strRecordingTime += minutes + ":";
seconds = seconds % 60;
if (seconds >= 0 && seconds < 10)
strRecordingTime += "0" + seconds;
else
strRecordingTime += seconds;
return strRecordingTime;
}
//---------------------------------------------
// audio thread, gets and encodes audio data
//---------------------------------------------
class AudioRecordRunnable implements Runnable {
@Override
public void run() {
android.os.Process.setThreadPriority(android.os.Process.THREAD_PRIORITY_URGENT_AUDIO);
// Audio
int bufferSize;
ShortBuffer audioData;
int bufferReadResult;
bufferSize = AudioRecord.getMinBufferSize(sampleAudioRateInHz,
AudioFormat.CHANNEL_IN_MONO, AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_16BIT);
audioRecord = new AudioRecord(MediaRecorder.AudioSource.MIC, sampleAudioRateInHz,
AudioFormat.CHANNEL_IN_MONO, AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_16BIT, bufferSize);
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
samplesIndex = 0;
samples = new ShortBuffer[RECORD_LENGTH * sampleAudioRateInHz * 2 / bufferSize + 1];
for (int i = 0; i < samples.length; i++) {
samples[i] = ShortBuffer.allocate(bufferSize);
}
} else {
audioData = ShortBuffer.allocate(bufferSize);
}
Log.d(LOG_TAG, "audioRecord.startRecording()");
audioRecord.startRecording();
/* ffmpeg_audio encoding loop */
while (runAudioThread) {
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
audioData = samples[samplesIndex++ % samples.length];
audioData.position(0).limit(0);
}
//Log.v(LOG_TAG,"recording? " + recording);
bufferReadResult = audioRecord.read(audioData.array(), 0, audioData.capacity());
audioData.limit(bufferReadResult);
if (bufferReadResult > 0) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "bufferReadResult: " + bufferReadResult);
// If "recording" isn't true when start this thread, it never get's set according to this if statement...!!!
// Why? Good question...
if (recording && rec) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "Recording audio");
if (RECORD_LENGTH <= 0) try {
recorder.recordSamples(audioData);
//Log.v(LOG_TAG,"recording " + 1024*i + " to " + 1024*i+1024);
} catch (FFmpegFrameRecorder.Exception e) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "AudioThread Finished, release audioRecord");
/* encoding finish, release recorder */
if (audioRecord != null) {
audioRecord.stop();
audioRecord.release();
audioRecord = null;
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "audioRecord released");
}
}
}
//---------------------------------------------
// camera thread, gets and encodes video data
//---------------------------------------------
class CameraView extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback, PreviewCallback {
private SurfaceHolder mHolder;
private Camera mCamera;
public CameraView(Context context, Camera camera) {
super(context);
Log.w("camera", "camera view");
mCamera = camera;
mHolder = getHolder();
mHolder.addCallback(CameraView.this);
mHolder.setType(SurfaceHolder.SURFACE_TYPE_PUSH_BUFFERS);
mCamera.setPreviewCallback(CameraView.this);
}
@Override
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
try {
stopPreview();
mCamera.setPreviewDisplay(holder);
} catch (IOException exception) {
mCamera.release();
mCamera = null;
}
}
public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder holder, int format, int width, int height) {
stopPreview();
Camera.Parameters camParams = mCamera.getParameters();
List sizes = camParams.getSupportedPreviewSizes();
// Sort the list in ascending order
Collections.sort(sizes, new Comparator() {
public int compare(final Camera.Size a, final Camera.Size b) {
return a.width * a.height - b.width * b.height;
}
});
camParams.setPreviewSize(imageWidth, imageHeight);
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "Setting imageWidth: " + imageWidth + " imageHeight: " + imageHeight + " frameRate: " + frameRate);
camParams.setPreviewFrameRate(frameRate);
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "Preview Framerate: " + camParams.getPreviewFrameRate());
mCamera.setParameters(camParams);
List videoSizes = mCamera.getParameters().getSupportedVideoSizes();
// Set the holder (which might have changed) again
try {
mCamera.setPreviewDisplay(holder);
mCamera.setPreviewCallback(CameraView.this);
startPreview();
} catch (Exception e) {
Log.e(LOG_TAG, "Could not set preview display in surfaceChanged");
}
}
@Override
public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
try {
mHolder.addCallback(null);
mCamera.setPreviewCallback(null);
} catch (RuntimeException e) {
// The camera has probably just been released, ignore.
}
}
public void startPreview() {
if (!isPreviewOn && mCamera != null) {
isPreviewOn = true;
mCamera.startPreview();
}
}
public void stopPreview() {
if (isPreviewOn && mCamera != null) {
isPreviewOn = false;
mCamera.stopPreview();
}
}
@Override
public void onPreviewFrame(byte[] data, Camera camera) {
if (audioRecord == null || audioRecord.getRecordingState() != AudioRecord.RECORDSTATE_RECORDING) {
startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
return;
}
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
int i = imagesIndex++ % images.length;
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "recording:" + recording + "rec:" + rec);
if (recording && rec) {
yuvImage = images[i];
timestamps[i] = 1000 * (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime);
totalRecordedTS++;
} else {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "recording is paused");
yuvImage = null;
timestamps[i] = -1;
}
}
/* get video data */
if (yuvImage != null && recording && rec) {
if (data.length != imageWidth * imageHeight) {
Camera.Size sz = camera.getParameters().getPreviewSize();
imageWidth = sz.width;
imageHeight = sz.height;
destWidth = imageHeight;
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "data length:" + data.length);
}
ByteBuffer bb = (ByteBuffer) yuvImage.image[0].position(0); // resets the buffer
int start = 2 * ((imageWidth - destWidth) / 4); // this must be even
for (int row = 0; row < imageHeight * 3 / 2; row++) {
bb.put(data, start, destWidth);
start += imageWidth;
}
}
}
}
@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
if (!recording) {
startRecording();
Log.w(LOG_TAG, "Start Button Pushed");
btnRecorderControl.setText("Stop");
} else {
// This will trigger the audio recording loop to stop and then set isRecorderStart = false;
stopRecording();
Log.w(LOG_TAG, "Stop Button Pushed");
btnRecorderControl.setText("Start");
}
}}Changes made as per Alex Cohn’s suggestions
Suggestion 1 - Estimate average frame rate
public void stopRecording() {
..............................
if (((i % images.length) != 0) && images[i % images.length] != images[(i % images.length) - 1]) {
if (t > recorder.getTimestamp()) {
t += 1000000 / frameRate;
recorder.setTimestamp(t);
}
recorder.record(images[i % images.length]);
}
..........................................
}Change made was adding t += 1000000 / frameRate ; But this caused the video to freeze (as in case 1 described above) in portions when finger was placed away from screen.
Suggestion 2 - Modification in onPreviewFrame()
long[] timestampsForRecorder;
private void initRecorder() {
Log.w(LOG_TAG, "init recorder");
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
.......................................................
timestampsForRecorder = new long[images.length];
for (int i = 0; i < images.length; i++) {
images[i] = new Frame(destWidth, imageHeight, Frame.DEPTH_UBYTE, 2);
timestamps[i] = -1;
timestampsForRecorder[i] = -1;
}
} else if (yuvImage == null) {
yuvImage = new Frame(destWidth, imageHeight, Frame.DEPTH_UBYTE, 2);
Log.i(LOG_TAG, "create yuvImage");
}
...................................................
}
@Override
public void onPreviewFrame(byte[] data, Camera camera) {
if (audioRecord == null || audioRecord.getRecordingState() != AudioRecord.RECORDSTATE_RECORDING) {
startTime = SystemClock.elapsedRealtime();
return;
}
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
int i = imagesIndex++ % images.length;
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "recording:" + recording + "rec:" + rec);
if (recording && rec) {
yuvImage = images[i];
long thisFrameTime = SystemClock.elapsedRealtime();
timestamps[i] = thisFrameTime;
long lastFrameTime = timestamps[(int) (imagesIndex == 0 ? startTime : ((imagesIndex-1) % images.length))];
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "lastFrameTime:" + lastFrameTime+",stopPauseTime:" + stopPauseTime);
if (lastFrameTime > stopPauseTime) {
timestampsForRecorder[i] = 1000 * (thisFrameTime - Math.max(stopPauseTime, lastFrameTime));
}
}
}
.....................................................
}
public void stopRecording() {
.......................................................
if (recorder != null && recording) {
if (RECORD_LENGTH > 0) {
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "Writing frames");
try {
int firstIndex = imagesIndex % samples.length;
int lastIndex = (imagesIndex - 1) % images.length;
if (imagesIndex <= images.length) {
firstIndex = 0;
lastIndex = imagesIndex - 1;
}
if ((startTime = timestampsForRecorder[lastIndex] - RECORD_LENGTH * 1000000L) < 0) {
startTime = 0;
}
if (lastIndex < firstIndex) {
lastIndex += images.length;
}
for (int i = firstIndex; i <= lastIndex; i++) {
if (timestampsForRecorder[i] != -1) {
long t = timestampsForRecorder[i % timestampsForRecorder.length] - startTime;
if (t >= 0) {
if (((i % images.length) != 0) && images[i % images.length] != images[(i % images.length) - 1]) {
if (t > recorder.getTimestamp()) {
recorder.setTimestamp(t);
}
Log.v(LOG_TAG, "imageIndex=" + (i % images.length));
recorder.record(images[i % images.length]);
}
}
}
}
.............................................
} catch (FFmpegFrameRecorder.Exception e) {
.................................
}
}
...........................................
}
}The video recorded using this was having the issue in case 2 mentioned above. ie,It was playing at a faster rate
-
ffmpeg decoding slow calling without avformat_find_stream_info
29 octobre 2015, par skipperI am decoding h264 rtp stream with ffmpeg on android. I found a strange problem : if I don’t call
avformat_find_stream_info,decodingP frametakes tens of micro seconds, by contrast, callingavformat_find_stream_infobefore decoding will reduceP framedecoding time to less than 1 ms on average. However,avformat_find_stream_infoitself is time consuming on network streams. Are there anything I can do to make decoding fast without callingavformat_find_stream_info? -
My journey to Coviu
27 octobre 2015, par silviaMy new startup just released our MVP – this is the story of what got me here.
I love creating new applications that let people do their work better or in a manner that wasn’t possible before.
My first such passion was as a student intern when I built a system for a building and loan association’s monthly customer magazine. The group I worked with was managing their advertiser contacts through a set of paper cards and I wrote a dBase based system (yes, that long ago) that would manage their customer relationships. They loved it – until it got replaced by an SAP system that cost 100 times what I cost them, had really poor UX, and only gave them half the functionality. It was a corporate system with ongoing support, which made all the difference to them.
The story repeated itself with a CRM for my Uncle’s construction company, and with a resume and quotation management system for Accenture right after Uni, both of which I left behind when I decided to go into research.Even as a PhD student, I never lost sight of challenges that people were facing and wanted to develop technology to overcome problems. The aim of my PhD thesis was to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of audio and video on the Internet (yes, this was 1994 !) by developing algorithms to automatically extract and locate information in such files, which would enable users to structure, index and search such content.
Many of the use cases that we explored are now part of products or continue to be challenges : finding music that matches your preferences, identifying music or video pieces e.g. to count ads on the radio or to mark copyright infringement, or the automated creation of video summaries such as trailers.
This continued when I joined the CSIRO in Australia – I was working on segmenting speech into words or talk spurts since that would simplify captioning & subtitling, and on MPEG-7 which was a (slightly over-engineered) standard to structure metadata about audio and video.
In 2001 I had the idea of replicating the Web for videos : i.e. creating hyperlinked and searchable video-only experiences. We called it “Annodex” for annotated and indexed video and it needed full-screen hyperlinked video in browsers – man were we ahead of our time ! It was my first step into standards, got several IETF RFCs to my name, and started my involvement with open codecs through Xiph.
Around the time that YouTube was founded in 2006, I founded Vquence – originally a video search company for the Web, but pivoted to a video metadata mining company. Vquence still exists and continues to sell its data to channel partners, but it lacks the user impact that has always driven my work.As the video element started being developed for HTML5, I had to get involved. I contributed many use cases to the W3C, became a co-editor of the HTML5 spec and focused on video captioning with WebVTT while contracting to Mozilla and later to Google. We made huge progress and today the technology exists to publish video on the Web with captions, making the Web more inclusive for everybody. I contributed code to YouTube and Google Chrome, but was keen to make a bigger impact again.
The opportunity came when a couple of former CSIRO colleagues who now worked for NICTA approached me to get me interested in addressing new use cases for video conferencing in the context of WebRTC. We worked on a kiosk-style solution to service delivery for large service organisations, particularly targeting government. The emerging WebRTC standard posed many technical challenges that we addressed by building rtc.io , by contributing to the standards, and registering bugs on the browsers.Fast-forward through the development of a few further custom solutions for customers in health and education and we are starting to see patterns of need emerge. The core learning that we’ve come away with is that to get things done, you have to go beyond “talking heads” in a video call. It’s not just about seeing the other person, but much more about having a shared view of the things that need to be worked on and a shared way of interacting with them. Also, we learnt that the things that are being worked on are quite varied and may include multiple input cameras, digital documents, Web pages, applications, device data, controls, forms.
So we set out to build a solution that would enable productive remote collaboration to take place. It would need to provide an excellent user experience, it would need to be simple to work with, provide for the standard use cases out of the box, yet be architected to be extensible for specialised data sharing needs that we knew some of our customers had. It would need to be usable directly on Coviu.com, but also able to integrate with specialised applications that some of our customers were already using, such as the applications that they spend most of their time in (CRMs, practice management systems, learning management systems, team chat systems). It would need to require our customers to sign up, yet their clients to join a call without sign-up.Collaboration is a big problem. People are continuing to get more comfortable with technology and are less and less inclined to travel distances just to get a service done. In a country as large as Australia, where 12% of the population lives in rural and remote areas, people may not even be able to travel distances, particularly to receive or provide recurring or specialised services, or to achieve work/life balance. To make the world a global village, we need to be able to work together better remotely.
The need for collaboration is being recognised by specialised Web applications already, such as the LiveShare feature of Invision for Designers, Codassium for pair programming, or the recently announced Dropbox Paper. Few go all the way to video – WebRTC is still regarded as a complicated feature to support.
With Coviu, we’d like to offer a collaboration feature to every Web app. We now have a Web app that provides a modern and beautifully designed collaboration interface. To enable other Web apps to integrate it, we are now developing an API. Integration may entail customisation of the data sharing part of Coviu – something Coviu has been designed for. How to replicate the data and keep it consistent when people collaborate remotely – that is where Coviu makes a difference.
We have started our journey and have just launched free signup to the Coviu base product, which allows individuals to own their own “room” (i.e. a fixed URL) in which to collaborate with others. A huge shout out goes to everyone in the Coviu team – a pretty amazing group of people – who have turned the app from an idea to reality. You are all awesome !
With Coviu you can share and annotate :
- images (show your mum photos of your last holidays, or get feedback on an architecture diagram from a customer),
- pdf files (give a presentation remotely, or walk a customer through a contract),
- whiteboards (brainstorm with a colleague), and
- share an application window (watch a YouTube video together, or work through your task list with your colleagues).
All of these are regarded as “shared documents” in Coviu and thus have zooming and annotations features and are listed in a document tray for ease of navigation.
This is just the beginning of how we want to make working together online more productive. Give it a go and let us know what you think.
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