Video for Kindle

[chrislo]

http://www.frisnit.com/?p=142

[gojomo]

That's a clever way to radically compress a video! It's like a final-video-back-to-storyboard converter.

One blemish on the in-page player is the 'loading' dialog that pops on each forward-frame.

The player could also benefit from an auto-advance feature... perhaps a fade from frame to frame? (How much faster than realtime could a show be watched this way? I've occasionally tried to watch a Tivo'd show at 2x with captions on, but captions get missed or excluded by the onscreen controls.)

Certainly could try doing a slideshow-plus-audio, too.

FYI, the PDF is about 23MB, 528 frames each 30-60KB each. IIRC, a standard-definition ~22 minute sitcom from ITunes runs 250-300MB in size.

[AndrewDucker]

That's fantastically impressive.

Using that to enable people to catch up with episodes of TV they've missed, but in less time that it would take to watch the episode would probably be very popular.

[Tichy → AndrewDucker]

Reminds me of "Microserfs", where the protagonists take to watching foreign movies on fast forward.

[notauser → Tichy]

Watching most movies at 1.2x normal speed is undetectable vs 1x, and a lot of TV is perfectly watchable at 2x normal speed.

I used to use MythTV for this - it meant my 15 minute breaks from work could fit in a whole show of something and I wouldn't feel tempted to 'just carry on watching to the end of this episode'.

[dvdhsu]

Perhaps somebody could create a service and send new episodes automatically to the free Kindle e-mail address that pushes via WiFi.

That way, once a new episode comes out, boom, it's on your Kindle ready to watch with no intervention on your part.

[rmc → dvdhsu]

Such a service would probably quickly run into copyright problems... which is a shame, since it's not directly competing (per se).

[gregable]

Awesome idea. One obvious problem I noticed when flipping through the example is the motion blur. I wonder if there are any algorithms that can reduce that given several frames of motion.

[rmc → gregable]

Rather than reducing motion blur on an image, it would probably be easier to choose a non-blurry frame.

[inportb]

This is quite innovative, really.

[grncdr]

Works well enough that I got sucked into the show in the middle rather than finishing the article ;)

[e1ven]

This is seriously cool stuff! I'd love to see this ported to work more broadly; Perhaps anime might be a good usage;

There's a lot of material out there with subtitles due to the language barrier.. Wow. This is just really nice.

[Retric → e1ven]

FYI, Most TV has subtitles (aka closed captioning) for the hearing impaired.

[davewasthere]

I would love to watch films/tv episodes on my kindle this way. Although half of the enjoyment is in watching an actor perform - I find it a struggle to spend any significant time watching television. Whereas, I could consume an episode fairly quickly in this format.

Although I'm sure a lot would be lost in translation. Could you imagine watching Scrubs in this format? Or House?

[geon → davewasthere]

I can imagine Seinfeld and possibly The Simpsons would work.

[spobin]

I don't own an eReader and therefore have never had this problem but it's still a really nice idea and it could be popular.

I assume that keeping up with Eastenders is laborious at the best of times so this could take some of the load off :P

[korny]

I wonder if there are other possibilities for this? Such as, you could use it to produce print versions of educational videos for distributing to poor rural areas...

[tomjen3]

Just to test it I ran through the embedded viewer, but it wasn't that much faster than watching it (based on the timer in the corner).

Still very cool idea, though.

[custominstall]

Forget all the fuss about 3D this is much better way to see movies

[flarg]

This is awesome, I would pay for this as a service.

[dsifry]

This is awesome.

[chopsueyar]

Very impressed.