About MovieML
Summary
MovieML is a free web app for setting user-defined XML markers in videos and audio tracks. Intended as a media mark-up tool for creators, hobbyists, theorists, and presenters, it can be used for setting simple bookmarks in favourite films or audio tracks, for conducting detailed sequence-by-sequence annotations of media files, and for extracting timecourse segments to video and audio clips.
Markers can be set either individually as single timestamps, or in pairs to bracket runtime segments. Marker-sets can be created, colour-coded and annotated per media file, as well as being organised into generic sequences and exported as XML-formatted schemas. Runtime segments can also be exported as video clips (video clipping requires a patch).
All media file work is done right on your hard disk and nothing needs to be uploaded.
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Background
Statistical and experimental software for analysing film timelines range from shot-length analysis (eg. Cinemetrics») and eye-tracking applications (OpenGazer», PyGaze») to emerging machine-learning environments (StoryFit», Cinelytic» etc). Other applications (Schema.org», MetaMovie») allow more detailed tagging of movie metadata, and commercial video editing suites offer chapter and segment markers. MovieML fills a niche as a free, stand-alone video marker editor, allowing notional and structural aspects of the film narrative itself to be ‘marked-up’, whether into script divisions such as act, scene, and rushes, or into the narrative sequences advocated by Jean Mandler», Paul Gulino», Stuart Voytilla», and others.
Technology
MovieML is a browser-based web app accessed from https://movieml.org/app/ and used to create XML-formatted video marker information directly from media files on a user’s hard disk without needing to upload media files to a server. The executive source code is written in Javascript (ECMAScript2019), and presentation mark-up and styling are rendered in HTML5 and CSS3 respectively. Chrome and Edge browsers are recommended as they both support a wider range of native media filetypes than Firefox. A minimum screen resolution of 1280x720 is also recommended.
For extracting and saving video clips, the user must install a patch. This feature is currently implemented for Windows, and will ultimately include Apple and Linux. The download package includes an FFmpeg distribution, an intermediate link-processing executable called ‘caller.exe’, and a registry patch. FFmpeg calls from the online MovieML code are executed locally as a custom URI protocol via caller.exe. The registry patch registers caller.exe as the custom URI handler. Installation instructions for the video clip patch are available from https://MovieML.org/help/.