How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

I would think the first few steps could be combined into one, faster step by using Handbrake to rip DVDs directly to MP4. But I also don't see why that stage takes hours on his machine, even on my 2006 rig it took less than the playtime of the DVD.

Re: How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

#5

Post by MisterNegative » Sun, Aug 10, 2014, 9:29 PM UTC

The title is very misleading for me, I expected magic but it was kind of disappointing. They don't even OCR actual video, instead they just take a few screenshots.

Re: How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

#6

Post by waldoj » Sun, Aug 10, 2014, 9:58 PM UTC

robinhoodexe wrote: post #2

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... Google cache of the site if it's unavailable (I'm getting a database error).

Memcached wasn't running for some reason. I've just fired it up, and all's well now.

Re: How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

#7

Post by waldoj » Sun, Aug 10, 2014, 9:59 PM UTC

Here's the code on GitHub: https://github.com/openva/video-indexer It's terrible (I wrote it for a very narrow use case, and only run it ~200 times each year), but it's enough to get the idea.

Re: How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

#8

Post by waldoj » Sun, Aug 10, 2014, 10:01 PM UTC

burnte wrote: post #4

I would think the first few steps could be combined into one, faster step by using Handbrake to rip DVDs directly to MP4. But I also don't see why that stage takes hours on his machine, even on my 2006 rig it took less than the playtime of the DVD.

I don't want to rip directly to MP4, because I retain a copy of the VOB files. I was doing all of this on a Mac mini that I bought in 2006.

Re: How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

#9

Post by maddev » Sun, Aug 10, 2014, 10:28 PM UTC

Good work! Really like how you narrow the selection at the end of the worklow!

Re: How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

#10

Post by samirmenon » Sun, Aug 10, 2014, 11:33 PM UTC

This is awesome. Who cares that it's a little cumbersome - it works!

On a more national scale, could something like this be done for Congress? C-SPAN already does most of the hard work of filming and uploading to the web, so perhaps it won't be too difficult. I think it would certainly attract a lot of interest... maybe I'll give it a go.