HighlightCam (YC S09) Releases Video Summarization API | Hacker News Reader

HighlightCam (YC S09) Releases Video Summarization API

code.google.com

60 pointsmjtokelly18 comments

It's fast. I tried a 17MB flv, chose 10% summary and got the response in 1min4sec. Screen: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1704650/camapi.png

It filters the boring moments well. The Animals and YouTube ZeitGeist examples opened my eyes.

Just for fun I tried to stump it with a video I had personally edited. See before and after: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1704650/hlcamtest.html. Pretty good result, all things considered.

Time to plug my own editing startup: http://videothink.com. Host any video file and I will personally cut all the boring moments and serve you the highlight movie. The site is very minimal now but it works.

This is a really cool product, yet not something I would have imagined there being a startup for. Regardless, great job guys and good luck!

Now I finally know what to do with all of my old videos filled with lots of crap. No more lengthy crappy videos.

Yeah, funnel all those boring family reunion vacation VHS tapes in there. Though I'm not sure if their algorithm will be smart enough to get all the exciting bits since our camera man has a shaky hand and they probably use some kind of motion detection.

We actually just improved the algorithm to address exactly that scenario:

http://blog.highlightcam.com/post/176798199/highlighting-now...

Camera motion is no longer considered "interesting" unless there's other motion against the static background. Works especially well with jittery cameras and panning security cameras.

Your debug page is showing: http://highlightcam.com/about/

Fixed--thanks!

What are the other YC companies that have released code under a open source / free software license ?

Very briefly -- http://www.xobni.com/about/opensource

Note that this is just sample code to connect to HighlightCam's webservices API.

I think Objective-J is one of the more notable YC-spawned open source thingers:

http://objective-j.org/

Virtualmin is also a pretty big contribution:

http://www.virtualmin.com/download

I love the concept, but watching the example videos I kinda wish they'd implemented a transition in there. Some of videos were really jarring moving from "interesting" to "interesting" states. A small audio/visual fade out and then in again would help a lot.

Looks neat, but with all that javascript, I can't watch the videos or even see the youtube page, so even though I'd like to earn more, I can't.

You must be running IE, the only browser with outdated javascript abilities.

Was using Opera. Tried in Firefox too. Neither worked. If the hyperlinks were actually hyperlinks, then it'd work.

Links are not mere links when they need to perform certain programmatic side-effects, so having them be just regular links wouldn't work.

I am interested in the bug you are experiencing. Could you email me at support@hlcam.com with a more detailed description?

I guess here, it's the definition of need. Do you need to track your users every movement more than you need them to learn about your product?

Looking at the youtube zeitgeist page you have, most of the videos seem insanely shortened. What is a more reasonable percentage choice to get just the highlights without feeling like you are talking to a meth-head?

With the API, you can choose any desired length of the summarized video, up to 30%. We think of the YouTube summaries as "trailer length", but we might make them a bit longer by default in the future.

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