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May 4, 2010

Paper Based Video

During a meeting with our collaborators at ICAP, of the Universite de Lyon 1 in France, we discussed the concept of “paper based video”. Both ICAP and SpokenMedia have received a use case to create a low-bandwidth version of transcribed lecture videos. For user communities with low or no bandwidth, lecture videos with transcripts provide an opportunity for those users to “watch” the video by viewing screen captures and the corresponding text transcript.

Below is a mockup of what “paper based video” might look like.

Paper-based Video Interface Mockup
Source: Brandon Muramatsu

Paper-based Video Interface Mockup

In the mockup you can see the options for HTML or PDF. Our colleagues at ICAP are very familiar with the capabilities of Adobe products and have suggested PDF as an output mechanism because it allows for embedding video inside the document. We’ll have to see how this video embedded in PDF degrades if there is no network connection, and whether we can easily create and maintain a screen capture version and an embedded video version. (More on the HTML option in a later post.)

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April 20, 2010

Editing Protocol

We have settled on an editing protocol for communication between our player/transcript editor and the service that stores transcripts and videos.  The document in PDF format is attached below:

SpokenMedia Editing Protocol (PDF)

The protocol conforms to WC3’s proposed Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) 1.0 specification.[1]  We selected this specification because our primary data is time-aligned text and this specification is a standard used by our collaborators.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/ttaf1-dfxp/

Filed Under: Developer
April 20, 2010

Integrating the SpokenMedia Player with MIT OCW

We’re testing out the SpokenMedia Player interface on a mirror of MIT OCW through the OEIT Greenfield Project.

We’ve taken one video by Prof. Walter Lewin and modified the corresponding MIT video page with the player. It works pretty well, right out of the box–there’s a bit of conflict with the CSS namespace. (Right now the demo only includes the first two minutes of the transcript since I was doing the editing by hand.)

8.01 Classical Physics I: Powers of Ten – Units – Dimensions – Measurements – Uncertainties – Dimensional Analysis – Scaling Arguments

Updating the OCW Video Player with SpokenMedia
Credit: Brandon Muramatsu

Updating the OCW Video Player with SpokenMedia


We also have a demo online at the SpokenMedia site.

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April 12, 2010

SpokenMedia Transcript Editor

We’re working on a javascript-based transcript editor with our developer Ryan Lee at voccs.com.

The goals of the editor project are:

  • Low and high accuracy editors–We believe the best approach to transcript editing involves separating the editing into two distinct phases. In cases where the transcript is mostly accurate, we want to retain the time/word relationships. That is, for every word, we want to make sure we retain the timecode associated with that word. In cases where the transcript is mostly inaccurate, we believe it’s best to just edit the transcript as a single block of text. And that we’ll take the edited transcript and align it to the audio after the transcript editing is completed. Unfortunately, this will require a time delay (best case is about 1:1.5) to reprocess the video.
  • Be simple and intuitive to use.
  • Be a clean design.
  • Support the user with a limited amount of extra mousing and/or clicking (this is the one compelling reason for us to have the “low” and “high” accuracy editors).
  • Integrate an audio/video player within the UI of the transcript editor (instead of running the video/audio as a separate application, or in a separate window, from the editor).
  • An editing communication protocol to be implemented between the server and client browser.

We’ve seen some initial designs from Ryan, and once we have this design phase completed, we’ll post the editors with transcripts and go into a testing phase.

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April 5, 2010

Extending the Spiral Connect Player

Christophe Battier, Jean Baptiste Nallet and Alexandre Louys from ICAP at the Universite de Lyon 1 in France visited the SpokenMedia team in February 2010.

They are working on a new version of their virtual learning environment (VLE) — a learning management system (LMS) in American-speak — that has an integrated video player with a number of features of interest to SpokenMedia.

The player is Flash-based and provides the ability for users to create “bubbles” — or annotations/bookmarks — that overlay the video. These bubbles can be seen along a timeline, and can be used to provide feedback from teacher to student or highlight interesting aspects of the video.

Here’s a screenshot from the current version of the Spiral player:

Spiral Player with Bubbles
Source: Christophe Battier/Spiral

Spiral Player with Bubbles

We discussed with them, integrating the aspects of the transcript display in the player we’ve been developing.

The user can watch the video and see the transcript with a “bouncing ball” highlighting the phrase being said. The user can switch between transcripts in multiple languages. And, the user can search through the transcript and playback the video by double clicking on the search result.

We talked about how the SpiralConnect team might extend their player to integrate transcripts and also create annotations that could be displayed below (or to the side of the video) and not just overlay the video image.

Here’s a mockup of what we discussed.

SpiralConnect plus SpokenMedia Transcript Mockup
Source: Brandon Muramatsu

SpiralConnect plus SpokenMedia Transcript Mockup

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March 29, 2010

SpokenMedia Player

We’ve developed a first pass of a new video player for SpokenMedia that integrates video playback and transcript display. (Well, ok we did this in late-December and initially demo’d this in January with IIHS.)

Our goals with the player development:

  • Javascript-player
  • Play multiple videos on the same page
  • Highlight the phrase corresponding to relevant point in the video
  • Be able to switch between multiple audio tracks (if they are available)
  • Be able to switch between transcripts in multiple languages (if they are available)
  • Be able to search through a transcript, and play the video by clicking on the search result
  • Be able to open source the player
  • Include the OEIT logo

We worked with a great developer, Ryan Lee at voccs.com, to develop the player.

We used the player as part of our demo for the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.

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March 8, 2010

Developer Posts

Hi all, we’re adding a new feature to the site…Developer posts. We’ll periodically write posts dealing with the development of the SpokenMedia project.

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