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Searchable Video with Creative Suite 4

Combine the power of Flash and Soundbooth to create searchable video

By Richard Harrington | June 15, 2009

Making Searchable Video



We've placed an HTML (Web page) application on this book's Web site at http://www.peachpit.com/AEFlashCS4 (it's also in the downloadable files you've been working with). This application allows you to make your video searchable as if it were a text document. You'll need to make a couple of simple edits, and then everything will be good to go.

Customizing Adobe's Searchable Video Application



Adobe has created a Web application that allows users to search through your Flash video using transcript words as search terms. All the code needed to make this work is in the VideoSearch folder. You will need to customize this code so that it points to your video and transcript files. To do so, follow the steps below.

1. Add your video and transcript file to the VideoSearch/assets folder. For this example, place the gas.flv and gas.xml files you created earlier.

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2. Open the VideoSearch>searchableVideoPrefs.xml file in a text-editing application, such as TextEdit on the Mac or Notepad on a Windows machine.

3. In the searchableVideoPrefs.xml file, you'll see a few lines of code that look like this:

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Edit the text called asset_name.flv so that it matches the name of your media file. In this example, use gas.flv. You can also use an "absolute URL" to link to a video on the Web, such as:

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4. Next, you'll need to specify the name of the XML file. You'll edit the code that looks like this:

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Edit the text called asset_name.xml so it matches the name of your media file. In this example, use gas.xml.

In the searchableVideoPrefs file, you'll also see options for skinning the video. If you don't like the look of the video controls, you can change the skin reference...

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...to one of the other skins included in the Video-Search/skins folder. These are the same skins you see in Flash's Video Import Wizard.

5. By default, the application will not allow searches for words of less than five characters. This excludes simple, common words such as "the" and "and". You can modify this setting by changing the "5" in this preference:

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Testing the HTML



After the assets are loaded, you can simulate the searchable video. But first you'll need to get the simulation running with a few preferences tweaks.

1. Start your Web browser.

2. Open the file index.html. from the VideoSearch folder.

The application won't work at first because it's running on your hard drive, not on the Web. Flash is very leery of interactions between HTML and Flash movies that run on your desktop, since they might be made by "hackers" who are trying to damage your system. In this case, the concern is unwarranted.

3. Right-click on the video player and choose Settings.

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4. In the Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog, click the Advanced button.

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A new window opens in the Web browser that offers links to the Settings panel. Again, to protect Flash from hackers, you'll need to manually navigate to this setting.

5. In the Settings Manager, click the Global Security Settings Panel hyperlink.

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6. On the Global Security Settings tab, click the Edit Locations drop-down menu, and then choose the Add Location option.

7. Add the file video_player.swf (Chapter_14 Project Files > Video Search > video_player.swf).

8. Reload the Index.html Web page.

9. Try typing gas into the search form (a word that's in the transcript), and then click the Search button.

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10. Once the video player has located cue points, click them to see the cuepoint metadata.

11. Also, try clicking one of the Top Keywords to search for it in the video.

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Comments

Richard Harrington: | December, 05, 2009

Be sure that you use the right file formats… not all file types are supported.

Red2034: | December, 10, 2009

Great artical! Is there an .FLA file example?

denisw: | September, 01, 2010

Hi,
I came to this demo rather late as I’m using Sb CS5, and I was rather disappointed to find that this searchable-video-prog doesn’t work when it’s prepared in the CS5 version. I’m not sure, but it may be that Sb CS5 does not export exactly the same data in its xml file(?)  All the speech analysis, exporting, re-importing as markers, and then saving of the vid+metadata… all work well, but when launched in the browser, it stops at the “Please be patient… etc” dialogue box and never gets any further.

What would be really good, would be to have a copy of the .fla file of the video player, with its ActionScript, so I could have a go at matching the code that reads in the data with those in the exported xml file. Do you think there is any chance of that happening?

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