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YouTube adds annotations (and speech bubbles)
You can use three different formats, speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. You can see a speech bubble in the image above. A note looks pretty much the same, but without the arrow pointing toward a mouth. And the spotlight lets you draw a box around some element in the video. When a user scrolls their mouse over that element, the text will pop up.
Annotations are easy to customize. You can change the size, location on the screen, and location in the video. You can also adjust how long they stay on the screen.
[via Google Operating System]
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsAndrewJun 4th 2008 4:29PM
Pop-Up Youtube Video!
ToddJun 4th 2008 5:24PM
Whoa. Wait. There's video of Christina Warren on YouTube, that I can add captions to?
Brad LinderJun 4th 2008 5:24PM
Alas, no. You need to be the owner of a video in order to caption it.
KhidrJun 4th 2008 5:42PM
So basically, this is Google/Youtube crushing the dreams of Viddler.com, who had this idea first and is, either a) really sorry they didn't patent "a method for adding textual display to internet videos" or, b) calling their lawyers.
Brad LinderJun 4th 2008 5:43PM
Despite Amazon's attempts to patent "one click checkout," you're not supposed to be able to patent something if it's obvious. While you could patent a technical *method* for adding text to a web video, I think it would be about as hard to patent the concept as it would be to patent the idea of adding text to a web site.
ToddJun 4th 2008 5:47PM
Ummmmm text annotation of video has been around since the late 60's in the form of Closed Captioning. So no one better go cry in the corner and claim "patent".
I am in this space right now and YouTube's solution is just OK, it's not breaking any new ground. Wondering if anyone except total geeks will even notice/use it. And if I can add annotations to other peoples videos, what's the point?
Wanna see waaaaaaaaay more awesomer way to do it, check out Nico Nico Douga:
http://www.nicovideo.jp/
KhidrJun 4th 2008 5:51PM
yeah, I mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think closed captioning, and allowing the user at the point of upload to further edit their video and provide interactive annotations is a novel concept... but if the patent office was on its game all of that "prior art" like CC and hyperlinks, would probably raise eyebrows.
That said, with the number of patents granted to the iphone (I think it was over 200?) the USPTO hasn't exactly been stringent with the requirements.
JoshJun 4th 2008 11:29PM
And is it possible to turn off a feature as annoying as this without using Greasemonkey (or perhaps AdBlock if they use a js file or something to store the data)?