Hey HN, I'm one of the founders of Modfy.video - we just shipped Anno.so which lets you add timestamped comments and annotations (drawings, scribbles, notes) to videos & other media files.
We currently use it to add comments and markup to Loom videos about dev problems we share among our engineering team, it’s been a great help.
Anno.so supports uploaded videos, audio, YouTube videos, Loom videos, SoundCloud audio. It’s free to use with no sign-up required.
This is a project we spun out from a video editor we’re currently working on https://modfy.video if interested.
Thanks! It's less about those that consume and more about the creation process, giving feedback/thoughts while working on a video or a song.
Also we use it internally to share looms with our eng team, where we leverage timestamped comments and annotations to enhance the sharing and discussion of ideas
Just FYI, the word you selected for your startup reads exactly as "anus" for the Spanish speakers. If you plan to expand globally, you may want to take this into account.
Are you a spanish speaker yourself? Brief research suggests it would in fact read as "year" in spanish and in several other romance languages. "Ano" (one n) literally translates as anus.
This looks very nice and the YouTube/Loom integration is very nice.
What target user group are you aiming to serve? Given the number of video tools in the past two years, I find that the vertical served largely determines what features are most valuable.
Right now we have a couple of user groups in mind:
- We've been using it internal for more detailed product feedback on looms where we can draw and give some feedback to our eng team
- We've seen users using this for music feedback, sending drafts of songs to give feedback on before publishing them
- Finally we've see a use case similar to frame.io, essentially a lighter weight, less enterprise version of frame
Is it open source or are there plans to make it so? I'd be very interested how you do frame-accurate video annotations in the browser, as I found the currentTime attribute of HTML video elements to be too unreliable for this. (Context: I maintain a video annotation tool that is mostly used for marine imaging.)
For Anno we are using HTML video elements / YouTube embeds which have the same frame inaccuracy from currentTime. For our editor we have a WebGL-based solution that seems to get better frame granularity but still has some floating point rounding errors converting frames <-> seconds
There's also requestVideoFrameCallback() and seekToNextFrame() in the Web APIs but they are still experimental/not supported by all browser. The WebCodecs API is also experimental/not supported to all browsers but would allow you to decode and grab the individual frames from a video and draw them to a canvas
In Chrome and Edge you can use WebCodecs to decode and display video frames one-by-one. (this is what I used for the video editor at https://vidmix.app )
In other browsers you could build FFmpeg with webassembly and use that for frame-by-frame decoding but it's not going to be nearly as performant.
Decoding the video manually seems so much overkill when all that's needed would essentially be a currentFrame property. But it seems I have to explore this avenue as well. I only aim to support Chrome and Firefox but as much as I hate to admit it, Firefox is somewhat lacking on the video side anyway (as there is a bug that lets it display different video frames for the same currentTime than other browsers or FFmpeg [1]). Therefore I already discourage using Firefox for video annotation.
Yes, the shortcomings of the html video tag are quite unfortunate. Just some very small improvements would make it a lot more useful. One other issue I found at the time I was looking at it (not sure if it's still the case) was that stepping one frame forward wasn't any faster than seeking from a random location. Seemed like the video was decoded from the last keyframe every time, making it inefficient to iterate through the frames.
Some time ago, I've build an MVP around the exact same idea (although without the audio tagging). It's also free to use, and can be found at https://proofing.io
I can tell you up front, nobody seems interested in the 'annotations' part (drawing on the video). Only text notes seem to be used. Of course, this is only a limited view from our side. Maybe you guys see different results.
This is almost certainly overkill for what you're looking for since it's really intended for researchers (think linguistic transcriptions etc), but any kind of annotation goes really, even if you're only tagging whenever the color green is visible in a video or the sound of a rooster in an audio recording.
We currently use it to add comments and markup to Loom videos about dev problems we share among our engineering team, it’s been a great help.
Anno.so supports uploaded videos, audio, YouTube videos, Loom videos, SoundCloud audio. It’s free to use with no sign-up required.
This is a project we spun out from a video editor we’re currently working on https://modfy.video if interested.