Video Note Taking
Utility
This is the
VideoNoteTakerUtility project ("videonotetaker"). You can
download it here.
It runs on Mac and Windows.
The basic
function is to allow the user to take notes while watching a computer
media file. The program combines a media playback window and a very
simple text editor. Keyboard shortcuts can control playback, e.g.
pause/resume, skip back, etc. Note that this program can be used for
audio or video files, so it's great for transcribing audio
recordings. Sample screenshots for Mac and Windows are shown below,
with me watching a
movie and taking some notes in the text editor.
Why is this
useful? I wrote this to help myself when analyzing hours of field
study video. I found myself spending lots of time going back and
forth between a text editor and video player, pausing, restarting,
going back a few seconds, etc. I realized that most video players
don't have all the buttons I needed, like "go back 10 seconds and keep
playing" or "play 30 seconds, and stop." I further enhanced this
with a built-in text editor, with keyboard shortcuts to play/pause the
video, insert a timestamp from the video into the text, speed up or
slow down playback, and skip ahead or back a few seconds.
This software has one other interesting feature: if two people at
remote locations are watching the same video file, it can synchronize
their players, so that if one person pauses the video, it pauses the
other, and if one person skips ahead, the other player shows the same
thing. This can be handy for going over a video with some one
remote. Both people need to have a copy of the file on their own
machine, though, I haven't figured out how to get this to work with
streaming video.
My employer realized that, while useful, they aren't going to make any
money off this tool, so they are letting me make it available as open
source to the world. I hope you find it useful.
- Note: the
software uses the Quicktime for Java API, so you need to have
Quicktime 7 installed on your computer. (It does seem to work
with Quicktime 6 on Windows 2000, but I haven't done extensive
testing.) As far as I've been able
to tell, Quicktime for Java is not supported on Linux.
Sorry! If anybody knows a workaround for that, let me know.
But it does work on Windows and MacOS.
- Note: the
software relies on Java 1.5 or above.
Enjoy!
We are now investigating performance improvements using the YourKit profiler, thanks to them for a copy!
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