Show HN: Anno – Effortlessly annotate and comment on videos/audio | Hacker News Reader

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

anno.so

122 pointszackoverflow32 comments

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.

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?

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

Is it open source? If not, is there any way to integrate with you?

It is not open source at the moment but you can email me rahul@modfy.video and happy to chat about collaborating

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.

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.

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”.

+1 Confirmed. I'm Latino and "bad name" came to mind when I saw the HN entry. Good luck with your project.

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

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.

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

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.)

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

BIIGLE (https://biigle.de).

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.

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

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.

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

We use Next, but all the design is done in tailwind

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.

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://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

Thanks. I also found ELAN through a comment on a forum and installed it just minutes before you posted your comment.

Recently came across Dropbox Replay which seems to target a similar user base.

https://www.dropbox.com/replay

impressive

Finally, Anno2022 !

https://anno.so/ZajoaZ8zJbdpATREt9qGW

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