[vlc-devel] Media Enhancement Data support

[Roiy Shpaner]

Hey all,

 

I'm very happy to finally submit this work today.

I've been working on this project on and off for over a year, and hopefully
we can all enjoy the result soon.

 

In case you haven't been to VLC Dev Days 2013 (or if you need a reminder),
here is a summary of my work:

The idea is to let users tag content in the video. You can mark events with
start and end times, and assign them to layers (text annotations can be
added as well). This enables the viewer to pick the layers of events to
watch - only these desired events will be played, and the rest of the
content is skipped by default. You can check out some pictures here:
http://imgur.com/a/X6kfy

The data is saved in a separate file in a new format I created, called Media
Enhancement Data (.med). The required specification will be ready soon, but
for now you can look at the last picture in the link above to get the basic
idea.



 

 

This feature provides several advantages:

1) Customizing the viewing experience.

2) Gives substantially more information about the video content even before
watching it.

3) Annotations for optional added content to be played alongside the video.

 

The functionalities here also answer a couple of feature requests that pop
up often:

1) The ability to skip parts of the video (like commercials, adult
content... or to skip to it :P).

2) A bookmarking mechanism that works after closing the application (and can
represent more than just a single time point in the video).

 

Of course, all of these functionalities are optional and configurable.

 

I'm certain this work will make watching videos with VLC a lot more
efficient and fun. It will hopefully give VLC another edge over other
players that still do not have these capabilities.

 

You can download a few videos with example med files from:
https://mega.co.nz/#F!XNkChYqI!HSDBtXemny1z5KQKuerN5Q

Or alternatively play around with it and create files of your own (that
would help with testing as well!).

The interface should popup when you play a video that has a .med file with
the same name in the same folder. The leftmost button open the layers
control window, the second button shows/hides annotations, third button
disables/enabled auto-jumping. The rest should be straightforward.

 

So without further ado I will now send in the patches and await reviews.

Thanks,

Roiy

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