[MPlayer-dev-eng] Bug hunting party

[Michael Halcrow]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 05:09:19AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
>> (something about learning German)
> Movies ;)  No, really, subtitled movies (or TV) help a lot.

On that note...

I am in dialog with Dr. Alan K. Melby regarding video-assisted foreign
language learning.  Some of his work is described here:

http://www.ttt.org/about.html
http://www.uia.ac.be/didascalia/pedagora/downloads/abstracts02/Melby.doc

Dr. Melby and I got together because (1) I am a grad student at the
same university that he teaches at and (2) my EDL work on MPlayer is
just what he needs to do his research.  He is on the ISO standards
committee and has been involved in developing Open Standards for file
formats that describe video content.  He is attending some conferences
in China at the moment, and so we will not be able to discuss too much
more until he returns.

He has a keen interest in employing the use of Open Source software in
helping to develop Electronic Film Review (EFR) technology for use in
academia.  I told him that MPlayer would be a good place to start.  He
has an XML-based video content description format on the table, and he
would like to integrate it into MPlayer to control video playback.

One scenario would be that a student learning German would pop in a
German language DVD.  The XML file would contain timecodes of scenes
that exercise certain contructs of German.  It would be integrated
with a web browser so that the student could pull up a text relating
to the context of the scene that he is watching.  He would also be
able to skip around, turn on and off subtitles, and perform other
operations to assist in learning German.  Perhaps custom text verlays
could be done with OSD.  Good support for multiple languages is a
requirement for this.

Perhaps in one HTML frame, MPlayer-plugin will be running, and in
another frame, text relating to what it playing would pop up for the
student to follow.  Maybe portions of the video being played back
could be ``hyperlinked'', so that by clicking on the video during
playback, a page relating to what was clicked on can be displayed.
These are the kinds of things that Dr. Melby is interested in.

The first step is to figure out a good API for this XML video content
file parser.  :-)

Mike

-- 
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Michael Halcrow                             | mike at halcrow.us     
Developer, IBM Linux Technology Center      |                      
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Silence is foo.                             |
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