The cross-platform Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) application allows users to easily create comments and analyses of video documents, through the definition of time-aligned annotations and their mobilisation into automatically-generated or user-written comment views (HTML documents). Annotations can also be used to modify the rendition of the audiovisual document, thus providing virtual montage, captioning, navigation... capabilities. Users can exchange their comments/analyses in the form of Advene packages, independently from the video itself.
The Advene project aims at providing a model and a format to share annotations about digital video documents (movies, courses, conferences...), as well as tools to edit and visualize the hypervideos generated from both the annotations and the audiovisual documents.
With the Advene software, teachers, moviegoers, etc. can exchange multimedia comments and analyses about video documents. The project also aims at studying the way that communities of users (teachers, moviegoers, students...) will use these self-publishing tools to share their audiovisual "readings", and to envision new editing and viewing interfaces for interactive comment and analysis of audiovisual content.
The software consists in a graphical user interface, integrating a video player and an embedded webserver. The graphical user interface is both the authoring and visualisation environment for hypervideos.
The application allows to :
- create annotations linked to specific fragments of a video
- link annotations through relations
- structure annotations and relations through user-defined annotation-types and relation-types
- query the annotations
- specify rendering templates (called views) for the metadata and audiovisual document, which qualify as hypervideos.
All necessary metadata is stored in files called packages, that can be exchanged independently from the audiovisual document.
Three categories of hypervideos are available in Advene: static views, dynamic views and adhoc-views.
Static views are X(HT)ML templates that, applied on the annotations, generate a HTML document. The HTML document is served through the embedded webserver to a standard web browser. Snapshots from the video (extracted on the fly) can be used in the template. It is also possible to control the application (video player control, adhoc view opening...) though URLs.
Dynamic views are augmented video renderings, guided by the annotations. It is possible to caption the video, control the video behaviour (pause, change position...), etc according to the annotations.
Adhoc-views are programmed views available from the GUI. Among available views are a timeline, a transcription view synchronized with the video...
Sample packages are provided on the Advene website:
http://advene.org/examples.html
Both the Nosferatu analysis and the Ted Nelson speech analysis can be used as tutorials to go through the Advene features.
A user manual is also available at:
This software is covered by the GNU General Public Licence (version 2, or if you choose, a later version).