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Muvino - An MPEG-7 Video Annotation Tool

Version 0.11

Overview

Muvino is a tool for creating MPEG-7 metadata of videos. It consists of an embedded video player based on the ViTooKi library and an XML tree view allowing to navigate and edit an MPEG-7 document. It was designed to facilitate the creation and annotation of MPEG-7 VideoSegment descriptions, by which a video can be divided temporally into a hierarchy of semantic sections, like the chapters and sections of a printed book.

VideoSegment descriptors are created by splitting the current segment into subsegments at the current media time point shown in the video player. Special slider widgets facilitate quick navigation within the VideoSegment tree. The annotation data belonging to a VideoSegment can be edited in a user-friendly dialog, there is no need to manipulate the XML tree directly.

Muvino supports the following MPEG-7 descriptors within a VideoSegment:

CreationInformation/Creation/Title
CreationInformation/Creation/TitleMedia/TitleImage
CreationInformation/Creation/Abstract
semantic place and semantic time within the Semantic descriptor
FreeTextAnnotation and KeywordAnnotation within Abstract (see above) and TextAnnotation
MediaTime and TemporalDecomposition - maintained automatically by Muvino

Installation

Muvino is part of the ViTooKi tool kit. So all system and installation requirements of ViTooKi apply. There is only one binary called muvino, which gets installed automatically when make install is invoked in the ViTooKi top-level source directory.

However, note that Muvino requires Qt 3.1 or newer, which is not freely available for the Windows platform. This is also the reason why Muvino has not yet been compiled and tested on Windows.

Usage

Unfortunately, a separate user documentation is not available. However, most of the GUI elements should have an intuitive meaning. If not, the tool-tips appearing when the mouse is moved over the GUI elements may help.

To display help for the command-line options invoke muvino -h.

Known Problems and Missing Features

Muvino is not yet ready for a file release. The following problems need to be fixed:

The order of VideoSegment's XML child nodes does not conform to MPEG-7.
Video container files (MP4 or AVI) are always demultiplexed when they are loaded, even if the elementary stream files exist already from a previous load operation. This causes an annoying start-up delay for long (1-hour) videos.
Only VariationDescriptionType is implemented; at least, ContentDescriptionType should be supported, too.
For VariationDescriptionType, no Variation descriptor is generated, but is required in such an MPEG-7 document. At least, an audio variation description should be generated.
Support for MPEG-7 descriptors MediaUri, Creator, CreationCoordinates, and CopyrightString is not implemented.
The video segment edit dialog is modal, i.e. interaction with the main window is not possible while the edit dialog is open. Concurrent video play-back control should be allowed.
Non-leaf video segments cannot be inserted; their creation by moving selected sibling segments one level down into the new segment would be desireable.
Video play-back cannot be easily started at the start of a given video segment.
The single video frame specified by the TitleImage descriptor cannot be displayed.

Author

Mario Taschwer <mt@itec.uni-klu.ac.at>

Generated on Mon Sep 27 09:12:05 2004 for Muvino by

1.3.2