9 ms·

Show HN: Anno – Effortlessly annotate and comment on videos/audio

122 points by zackoverflow 4y ago

zackoverflow 4y ago
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 https://modfy.video if interested.
- rbarragan 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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
- idonov 4y ago
  Is it open source? If not, is there any way to integrate with you?
  - cryogenicplanet 4y ago
    It is not open source at the moment but you can email me rahul@modfy.video and happy to chat about collaborating
rememberlenny 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Finally, Anno2022 !
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zackoverflow 4y ago
  https://anno.so/ZajoaZ8zJbdpATREt9qGW https://anno.so/ZajoaZ8zJbdpATREt9qGW
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mzur 4y ago
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.)
- zackoverflow 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 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 4y ago
    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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735300
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
avh3 4y ago
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 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.
- asiachick 4y ago
  different cultures https://www.nicovideo.jp/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niconico
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
shimonabi 4y ago
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.
- cryogenicplanet 4y ago
  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 https://tauri.studio)?
- blipmusic 4y ago
  https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan 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_ELAN.pdf 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 https://github.com/dopefishh/pympi
  - shimonabi 4y ago
    Thanks. I also found ELAN through a comment on a forum and installed it just minutes before you posted your comment.
mattrighetti 4y ago
This reminds me a lot of SoundCloud's comments at a specific time in the audio, cool!
chaosprint 4y ago
Very interesting and very good design! Which framework does the website use?
- cryogenicplanet 4y ago
  We use Next, but all the design is done in tailwind
nonoesp 4y ago
Recently came across Dropbox Replay which seems to target a similar user base. https://www.dropbox.com/replay https://www.dropbox.com/replay
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dunnun 4y ago
Just FYI, the word you selected for your startup reads exactly as "anus" for the Spanish speakers. If you plan to expand globally, you may want to take this into account.
- syrrim 4y ago
  Are you a spanish speaker yourself? Brief research suggests it would in fact read as "year" in spanish and in several other romance languages. "Ano" (one n) literally translates as anus.
  - dunnun 4y ago
    Yes, Spanish speaker here. In fact, a double “n” reads pretty much as if it would have just one. Examples: “connotación”, “connatural”, “innecesario”. The Spanish word for year is “año”, and phonetically is distinct from “Anno”.
    - vladsanchez 4y ago
      +1 Confirmed. I'm Latino and "bad name" came to mind when I saw the HN entry. Good luck with your project.
FlyNestor 4y ago
impressive
laxmin 4y ago
Annotation of Videos holds a great potential for Educational videos, especially those demonstrating machinery, surgical procedures, etc. I will be trying this out at our med school immediately - excitedly.

122 points by zackoverflow 4y ago

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 https://modfy.video if interested.

rbarragan 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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
idonov 4y ago
Is it open source? If not, is there any way to integrate with you?
- cryogenicplanet 4y ago
  It is not open source at the moment but you can email me rahul@modfy.video and happy to chat about collaborating

rememberlenny 4y ago

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 4y ago
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

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Finally, Anno2022 !

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zackoverflow 4y ago
https://anno.so/ZajoaZ8zJbdpATREt9qGW https://anno.so/ZajoaZ8zJbdpATREt9qGW
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mzur 4y ago

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.)

zackoverflow 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 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 4y ago
  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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735300
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

avh3 4y ago

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 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.

asiachick 4y ago
different cultures https://www.nicovideo.jp/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niconico
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

shimonabi 4y ago

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.

cryogenicplanet 4y ago
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 https://tauri.studio)?
blipmusic 4y ago
https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan 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_ELAN.pdf 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 https://github.com/dopefishh/pympi
- shimonabi 4y ago
  Thanks. I also found ELAN through a comment on a forum and installed it just minutes before you posted your comment.

mattrighetti 4y ago

This reminds me a lot of SoundCloud's comments at a specific time in the audio, cool!

chaosprint 4y ago

Very interesting and very good design! Which framework does the website use?

cryogenicplanet 4y ago
We use Next, but all the design is done in tailwind

nonoesp 4y ago

Recently came across Dropbox Replay which seems to target a similar user base. https://www.dropbox.com/replay https://www.dropbox.com/replay

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dunnun 4y ago

Just FYI, the word you selected for your startup reads exactly as "anus" for the Spanish speakers. If you plan to expand globally, you may want to take this into account.

syrrim 4y ago
Are you a spanish speaker yourself? Brief research suggests it would in fact read as "year" in spanish and in several other romance languages. "Ano" (one n) literally translates as anus.
- dunnun 4y ago
  Yes, Spanish speaker here. In fact, a double “n” reads pretty much as if it would have just one. Examples: “connotación”, “connatural”, “innecesario”. The Spanish word for year is “año”, and phonetically is distinct from “Anno”.
  - vladsanchez 4y ago
    +1 Confirmed. I'm Latino and "bad name" came to mind when I saw the HN entry. Good luck with your project.

FlyNestor 4y ago

impressive

laxmin 4y ago

Annotation of Videos holds a great potential for Educational videos, especially those demonstrating machinery, surgical procedures, etc. I will be trying this out at our med school immediately - excitedly.