Show HN: Tagx.io – Create/share video highlights and annotations | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tagx.io – Create/share video highlights and annotations

tagx.io

57 pointscxam18 comments

The idea behind TAGX.io was to make it easier to share highlights of our football (soccer) video recordings. We have been recording and uploading our games to YouTube over the years and almost everyone that played watched it to see how well they/their team performed. It became an additional discussion point days after the game until the next one. However, it does become tedious having to sit through another hour until you find something special you want to share and discuss, usually this is in the form of “check out the goal 23 minutes in”. I built TAGX to ease this process where someone would go through the video, tag the interesting parts and share it with the group. It was almost like a highlight reel, allowing you to skip through the tagged parts.

This was my winter holiday side project last year and I figured there would be a wider application of this service (conference talks, tutorials, lengthy videos in general) so I decided to polish it up and make it available as a service for others to use. You don’t need to create any account to use it, it’s all client-side and built using Vue.js. It’s hosted on Cloudflare Workers Sites. I wanted to try out Cloudflare Workers/KV, so I ended up building a link shorting feature including authentication/authorisation flow. You can read more about the stack in support -> technology (https://tagx.io/support/general/technology) section.

Here is a tagged video of the AWS re:Invent 2019 event which I shared with someone recently that highlighted some announcements that were of interest to us: https://tagx.io/video/id/Nw-wisbyZPu0LCBk9Tzbn

Following are some development stats for those interested:

- Client-side: ~80 hours (15th Dec 2019 – 7th Jan 2020)

- Server-side: ~30 hours (19th Jan 2019 – 24th Jan 2020)

- Node Experience: 5+ years

- Vue.js Experience: 2+ years

Hope someone finds it useful and any feedback is much appreciated!

You might want to consider building a chrome extension. Users might have problems recalling your site.

Yea, that's always the issue. An extension would be ideal for desktop users and was considering that as a feature, however, for this initial release, I didn't want to alienate any mobile users that may not have the ability to install an extension. Appreciate your feedback and glad someone has the same idea, definitely makes it easier to prioritise features going forward.

+1 here. Would be awesome to have this attached to youtube directly.

Mobile users can use firefox extensions

With a plugin, people could bookmark/label/index videos themselves within YouTube in a way that is more powerful than what the playlists allow and without needing to resort to browser bookmarks.

Being able to distinguish between "my tags" and "public tags" would be necessary.

This is the same tagged video I shared in my previous post but without the need for any server-side requests and you can amend yourself: https://tagx.io/video/youtube/7-31KgImGgU/55:52-1:03:30@name...

I had this exact same idea in a political context. This could super useful for breakdowns of police footage. Might be wonderful for pro gaming too.

These are pretty good use cases, thanks! I hadn't thought of it in a political context, I can definitely see it work there considering the lengthy footage.

Love what this is trying to solve. If the UX could improve, it would be amazing. While watching it would be great to press a button to generate timestamps and to then compose tracks by selecting any two timestamps, with the ability to add tags to timestamps or tracks while the video is still playing or after. This way you could watch a video in one fluent sitting and work out how to organize with the timestamps you created while watching.

One usecase is the ability to link to a comedy sketch from a longer clip and send it to a friend with the link just playing between timestamp a and timestamp b.

Thanks for the feedback pknight. I'll address the points as follow:

(1) While watching it would be great to press a button to generate timestamps

This is already possible using hotkeys and documentation for it can be found here: https://tagx.io/support/advanced/hotkeys

(2) then compose tracks by selecting any two timestamps, with the ability to add tags to timestamps or tracks while the video is still playing or after

Just to clarify, do you mean the ability to add the current point in time of the video to different tracks? In which case, this is already possible using multiple hotkeys as outlined above. Please let me know if this is not what you meant.

(3) with the link just playing between timestamp a and timestamp b

You are able to create a loop between a tag or a set of tags, please see loop settings outlined here: https://tagx.io/support/interfaces/video

With regards to autoplay, this is a bit finicky depending on the browser and is usually not recommended due to the negative user experience so I didn't include an option to enable this feature.

Hope this is clear, let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks! It took me a while to digest how that tagging workflow worked with the hotkeys, but now I get it. That does work! I think one of the things that tripped me up was the lack of visual feedback on the second press of a key.

Am I right in thinking that the hotkeys don't work while the video is paused?

I guess the other thing I'd love to see is a more dedicated 'share' mode so that you can create a link with a simplified screen that starts playing the track section of a video when the user presses play.

Great, glad this worked well for you. I agree with your point on the visual feedback. Depending on which tab you have active, it will always show the newly created tag on the list when created. However, maybe a short-lived toast message could work better here.

You're correct, the hotkeys won't create a tag when the video is paused, instead it will start playing the video on first press then you'd need to press it again to actually creat the tag. If you want to manually create tags without playing the video then this can be done on the tracks interface. The "+" button in each track will display the modal to do so.

With simplified sharing, would you expect to show only the video without any of the tags and tracks on display? There are existing layout options you can customise such as hiding the tag/track listing and the tagging controls, even resizing the video. However, the play button just plays the video as normal. I think what you're suggesting with the play button only playing the tracks when shared in "simplified mode" would provide a cleaner interface to the end user without the additional components displayed.

Thanks again for the feedback, if you do have any other ideas and this post gets locked for commenting after two weeks, then please don't hesitate to create an issue or drop me an email as listed here: https://tagx.io/support/general/contact

Thanks! And yes, with simplified sharing it would be ideal to only have the player with just the track targeted and nothing for the person receiving the link to guess. So if you send someone a sports highlight, or a specific sketch from a comedy show, or a specific exercise explained in a tutorial, they only need to press play and it would only play the track, not the whole video.

Your app definitely has a lot of utility.

Great, I think this is something I'd like to bake into the next release.

Sweet project.. Is there any thought or plan to open source this project to contribute?

It did cross my mind when I released it. I'd like to refactor the code and bring in more tests to make it "contributor friendly" first. Feedback has been great so far and I'll be implementing some of the features on the back of that. There is a repo (https://github.com/cxam/tagx.io) already that I'm using for issue tracking and I'll be able to push the code there when it's ready.

Nice, I came across the repo after I posted.

Even if the code isn’t perfect it’s of interest to me because you also used Vue.

With respect to tests, maybe the community can contribute.

Will keep an eye on the repo..!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com