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Feature Preview - Video
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Hi all, I've been working on a much anticipated new feature for Geni: video support. I know we've hinted that it was coming, and there's been much speculation and comment about how it would be implemented.
I'm a software engineer, and I've been doing my best to build a feature that I could be proud of, and I want to tell you about what I've been working on with several of our other very talented engineers and designers.
To answer one question right away, Geni will be serving video ourselves -- we're not delegating that to any third party service. We're not embedding a player from anyone else. For one thing, that allows us to preserve the family privacy features that are such a hallmark of Geni.
For a network infrastructure engineer, video can really make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. All kinds of questions arise, like how big are these upload files going to be? Will we have enough server processing capacity to do the transcoding? Where are we going to store and serve all this data?
In trying to answer these questions early on, I learned about a product from On2 Technologies, the premiere company in the field of online video. They're the people to go to for video codecs, video publishing, and embedded video.
Everything we needed to do could have been done using free open source solutions for video, but nothing I found came close to what On2 offered for video publishing.
We spent the money, and licensed On2's excellent FlixPublisher plug-in system. It really makes video publishing on Geni a pleasure to use. Let me explain.
With most video sites, you upload a raw video file from your camera in whatever format it provides. These files are enormous, and most sites I've seen cap your upload at 100 megabytes. I have files from my wife's point-and-shoot camera that are 174 megabytes just for a minute and a half of video! That's no fun for either the uploader or the site, where we would have to wrangle all that data and get it transcoded to Flash for playback. I can't predict how long you would have to wait to actually see your video on the site.
Instead, we'll be using a browser plug-in provided for us by On2 to actually transcode your video files on your own computer. The plug-in will allow you to drag and drop a video file into your browser, or even record a video clip live using your own webcam and mic. The plug-in will transcode your video file into Flash video, then upload the much smaller Flash file to Geni. Your video will be ready to view immediately after the upload!
In the case of my 148 megabyte video that's 1:20 long (a minute and twenty seconds), it turns it into a 2.6 megabyte upload. Very manageable! And the encoding parameters we're using (at least for now) are pretty good: 400x300 pixel image size, 15 frames per second, 224 kbps video bitrate. To my eye at least, the video compares very favorably against most of the big video publishing sites, and provides a good balance of video quality, file size, and streaming speed. I'm still experimenting with different encoding parameters.
I know it can be a little scary to have to install a browser plug-in, but On2 has made the process quick, easy to follow and somewhat automatic. You only have to do it once. Everyone at Geni who's tried it has been favorably impressed. Plug-ins are provided for Internet Explorer on the PC, Firefox 2 on the PC, and Safari on the Macintosh. You need to use one of those browsers only for the upload plug-in -- the videos themselves will play back on any browser that supports Adobe Flash. (That's the same requirement to view Geni's tree.) The plug-ins are small, about two-thirds of a megabyte on the PC, and 2 megs on the Mac.
On my development PC, which isn't exactly a screaming performance machine, the video transcoding runs a little faster than actually playing the video. Transcoding a minute and a half of video takes about a minute fifteen. The uploads of those small Flash files are really quick on a broadband connection.
Now that the video is uploaded, what can you do with it on Geni? This is the really fun part for me -- you'll be able to do everything with video on Geni that you could do with photos on Geni: tag them with family members who are in the video, add them to events, and have comments from family members. New videos will be announced in the Family Newsletter and on your Home page.
Right now we're busily putting the finishing touches on video for Geni, and testing everything as best we can. I think it's one of the best things we could do for the site, and I'm proud to be associated with it. I look forward to working with you all and hearing about your own experiences with video for your families.
Now I have to ask you to be patient while we finish up. I'm as eager as you are, but I want to be sure it's as bug-free as we can make it before turning it loose.
I'm happy to answer any specific questions as best I can.
Morris "Mojo" Jones
Senior Software Engineer, Geni, Inc.Posted 1 year ago # -
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Here are a couple of screen shots.
Upload screen:
Video play screen:
Posted 1 year ago # -
@MojoLA,
This is great news. You guys at Geni are turning out great features at an incredible rate. I just want to say thanks!No questions yet as I have to go hands on and play before questions come to mind.
Keep up the great work! Geni has the Best Development Team!
Posted 1 year ago # -
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This is AWESOME news! Now just lift the limit on GEDCOM Import and I'll propose to you!
Oh man...I tried dropping-in the URLs from your screen shots and I got all excited when I was able to pull up MY Video sections on Geni! Too bad the script on the "upload" button isn't working...can't blame me for trying!
Can we download the app and install it to mess around with it prior to release?
This is some next-level stuff man! Can't wait to tag VIDEO! This will definetly be one of Geni.com's top offerings! It's will be #2 under GEDCOM Import/Merge for me!!!
Again, awesome news...can't wait to test it out especially the web-cam-edit option! Thanks for taking the time to outline a well-stated forum post for us to read as well as give us some teaser screen shots, very cool, very exciting!
Posted 1 year ago # -
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@MojoLA: OH WOW! ...this sounds awesome!! great work, I can't wait to see it in action, I appreciate you have to get it as right as possible though and will try to be patient :¬)
_TF
Posted 1 year ago # -
Great! Would be a plugin for firefox 3 anytime soon?
Posted 1 year ago # -
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<p>Great! Would be a plugin for firefox 3 anytime soon?
</p>I hope so! It can't be for the current release of Firefox 3; the On2 plug-in is dependent on a bug fix that's currently in their bug tracker system. Once the Firefox developers fix that problem, we'll be able to update the publisher plug-in.
Mojo
Posted 1 year ago # -
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"...you'll be able to do everything with video on Geni that you could do with photos on Geni"
Can there possibly the identify (as opposed to mere tagging) of people in a video? Y'know... the little green boxes?
Posted 1 year ago # -
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Can there possibly the identify (as opposed to mere tagging) of people in a video? Y'know... the little green boxes?
I know it seems *possible* to do the little green boxes, but my goodness, it is video after all. Maybe I'll figure out a way to do that somewhere down the line. :)
Mojo
Posted 1 year ago # -
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<p>Can there possibly the identify (as opposed to mere tagging) of people in a video? Y'know... the little green boxes?
</p><p>I know it seems *possible* to do the little green boxes, but my goodness, it is video after all. Maybe I'll figure out a way to do that somewhere down the line. :)</p>
<p>Mojo
</p>If you could pull that off you would not only be an awesome genealogic site and family networking site...you would be the GODS OF VIDEO STORAGE AND SHARING!!! I mean HOLY CRAP, I can't even imagine the ability to do the Little Green Boxes on video!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'll SOIL myself if you even hint to the ability to tag video images........and I will film my soiling of myself and post it WITH little green boxes tagging every item within aspect ratio...
Posted 1 year ago # -
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Well Scott I think that's disincentive enough... :-)
Posted 1 year ago # -
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Ha!! I assumed that the answer would've been, "Not a chance. How on earth could we do that??!?" In fact, I think that's what Mojo's answer meant.
Now that I try to re-read my question, I'm surprised anyone could even make sense of it. I meant to say...
"Can there possibly be the identifying of people in a video?"
Two mistakes in one line - unreadable! And too late to edit. Sorry.
Posted 1 year ago # -
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How about having a few frames associated with the video, where people could be identified? is that do-able? Then you could watch the video and then refer to the frames for people you didn't recognise.
_TF
Posted 1 year ago # -
I don't know if this would be possible in a flash environment, but in the video editing world we do what is known as keyframing. Basically, you put your green box on the people in your video. Then you play the video. When your subject moves out of the box, you stop the video, and move the box accordingly. Then play the video, stop when the subject moves out, move the box, and so on. Each time you stopped the video is a keyframe.
After this is done, when you play the video, the box will move from one keyframe to the next (it will always be moving, not jumping from keyframe to keyframe)
Posted 1 year ago # -
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We're not embedding a player from anyone else. For one thing, that allows us to preserve the family privacy features that are such a hallmark of Geni.
That's too bad. That probably means I'll have to continue to just post links then, still bypassing privacy.
And the encoding parameters we're using (at least for now) are pretty good: 400x300 pixel image size, 15 frames per second, 224 kbps video bitrate.
Presumably my HD 16:9 videos will get squished into a 4:3 format (which is one of the reasons I'll stay third party unfortunately).
Posted 1 year ago # -
Out of curiosity, would we be able to upload audio files without video through the same functionality?
Posted 1 year ago # -
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<p>Presumably my HD 16:9 videos will get squished into a 4:3 format (which is one of the reasons I'll stay third party unfortunately).
</p>No way -- I'll always preserve the aspect ratio. Last I saw of the player it shifted aspect ratio to match the video just fine. I used some of the Mars Phoenix QuickTime animations which were 16x9 for testing.
I put a screen shot here: http://photo.whiteoaks.com/geni/mars-clip.gif
(The embedded screen shots are a bit much ...)
Mojo
Posted 1 year ago # -
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Out of curiosity, would we be able to upload audio files without video through the same functionality?
Funny you should ask. Yes, the plug-in does support audio-only files. It will compress it to mono, and probably reduce the bit rate. In this circumstance the thumbnail extraction "fails," so I just make a black frame to use for the thumbnail. Maybe in the future I can use an "audio only" icon in place of the video thumbnail.
Mojo
Posted 1 year ago # -
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On the subject of identifying family members in a video ...
It's certainly possible to mark up a video with keyframes and graphics of some sort, that's just out of the scope of an initial release.
Certainly a good one for the wish list.
Mojo
Posted 1 year ago # -
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@MojoLA: This is not something I know a lot about so excuse my ignorance. I have a lot of old VCR recordings, what is the best/easiest way of converting clips of these to the right format so that I can then upload to Geni. I assume I would have to use something to convert it to digital, then use your plug-in to convert again? I have a DVD recorder, do I need to copy it to DVD first?
_TF
Posted 1 year ago #
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