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[RobOK]

Use Case:  I have a lot of home video that i have dumped to hard drive.  I would like to define short intervals with a file name, a start time and an end time.  One long video might have 10 or 20 of these pointer files.  think of them as CUE files for Video, telling MC to play only a certain subset of the video.

Does this make sense to anyone?  Any ideas on how to implement that?  It would almost have to be its own media type or something.

Any thoughts welcome!

R.

[hit_ny]

An interesting idea, if the media used supports sample exact seeking, it's technically feasible without resorting to tricks like with mp3.

[RobOK]

An interesting idea, if the media used supports sample exact seeking, it's technically feasible without resorting to tricks like with mp3.

You're already beyond my technical knowledge of video formats!!

[hit_ny]

Put it this way, if you click on a cue item, you expect the video to start at that point.

To be able to find that point, exactly, the format has to allow the player to seek to that point. Some formats allow this so its trivial to implement. Otherwise, like with mp3 it has to start counting up from the beginning up to the desired point.

It's all in how easy or not it is to implement.

Which video formats do you use currently ?

[RobOK]

Actually, i was tracking with you, but being a bit sarcastic.  I understand the concept, but not which formats.

As I think about it now, whether I could do that or not in my video editing software depended on whether the recorded video had an unbroken "timecode" from start to finish.  Many people do a first recording of the whole tape with the lens cap on to lay down a solid timecode.   If you don't do this, and you stop and rewind and restart, you end up without the timecode being consistent.


Most of the home video I have is AVI.

[hit_ny]

when you mentioned cue style, i thought cue files like they are used in audio.

You have to specify the start points in a txt file called a CUE file which is then imported into MC and you have start points for all the various tracks in the mix.Was thinking maybe it might be possible to use the same method with video as well.

But it isn't possible atm to create cue points on the fly from within MC even with audio, how essential would that be with video ?

I've requested they implement a bookmark style function for ages as it would be helpful to quickly find interesting parts of say..a long radio mix but there did not seem to be much interest in the idea. I imagine same could be done with video as well provided the digital format used is seekable.

AVI is a container and you could have any kind of video format in it, some are seekable others not. Trying to get consistant response with all video formats could be tricky.

[Alex B]

Time to bump this one too. Instead of GUI changes many users have been requesting functions like this.

In my opinion approximate bookmarks would be fine. Exact accuracy would not be necessary. MC could show the bookmark markers like this:



Besides using the obvious "add a marker now" function you could right-click the position slider area for adding a marker and also right-click a marker for removing it. The markers would be movable by dragging. Go to next and previous marker buttons would be available in some suitable place. On each audio or video track change MC would load the file specific markers.

[hit_ny]

That looks fine to me, but where would you label those bookmarks ?

i was hoping it would have the same features as columns in PN, assuming thats where the GUI will be. So when you set a bookmark, it adds an item to PN that can be tagged as appropriate.

[Alex B]

I suppose that these quick bookmarks would not need a ton of special code to the playback engine and file library. They would really be just approximate position slider related bookmarks so that you can quickly make and use a couple of markers on the "time line". Perhaps a right-click "add/edit name dialog" could be included. A tooltip would then show the bookmark name.

I have seen a program that can make tagged library-only subtracks that can be loaded to a playing now list independently of each other. That would be a totally different approach, more like the cue files work now.

[hit_ny]

.. more like the cue files work now.

Exactly, but this would be internal only, so you can set the points, and they are automatically created using playback range etc and have all tags open like a cue track. This might be a bit more demanding than the first way you suggested.

When you set a bookmark or cue-point, you usually want to return to it in the future, so if there is some way to tag and search for it then i guess all is good.

[RobOK]

JR.... with the new Internet video features, I think more people will be using MC for video.  Any consideration to this idea?