Flex and Video Annotation

Question

I have been investigating how to annotate video using Flex or AIR. Similar to how it is being done on YouTube. I am not getting much joy. Wondered if anybody might have any insight?

Thanks

--Matt

Answer 1

Matt you can refer the Youtube AS3 API's at

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/flash_api_reference.html

You can check some demo examples from the link above to get an understanding how you can start off. You can also do this with Javascript API's if you are interested.

We have used Youtube AS3 API for enriching videos for content companies and it was fairly straightforward to built it - check demo at onion.tv

Answer 2

Hi Matt,

This could actually be simpler than you thought.

Here's what I would do:

• Play the video
• When you see a spot you want to add an annotation for click the annotation button or the video to stop it and add an annotation
• When you click that button you grab the timecode from the video
• Save the timecode and your annotation details in a database
• The next time you play the video, you load the annotations and their timecodes from the database
• Before the video start playing you add cuepoints to it using the CuePointManager class in Flex
• Add an event listener to the video player that will listen for these cuepoints
• When the cuepoint hits you can show your annotation at the correct time code etc

Hope this helps.

Serge-

Answer 3

Thanks Serge. For video annotation. I'm wondering if you can treat the frame at which the video is paused just like an image.