We need shared Persistent Reproducible Identifiers
We live in an endless connected world of data. Linked data spans datasets, institutions, domains, and continents. It allows us to determine relations in the vast amount of digital information and to connect textual descriptive information to media files, such as provenance information. But what happens when a media file is shared out of this […]
Provenance information in the blockchain
Technologies for conveying provenance information are often conflated with blockchain technologies. As the blockchain is continuing to hype. Videorooter does not focus on the blockchain. The problem Videorooter seeks to address is a bit smaller, even if smaller doesn’t mean easy.
A vocabulary for media fingerprint algorithms
When we begun work on Videorooter, we felt that one of the most difficult tasks ahead of us would be to find algorithms suitable for our use. While there are definitely not so many algorithms for videos, there’s definitely a fair share of algorithms for images and sound (and remember, a video is essentially a sequence […]
Why we need open standards for fingerprinting
A fingerprint is a series of letters and numbers that hold no meaning to the human eye. The series of digits is the outcome of an algorithm applied to a media file. When using a certain algorithm and use perceptually the same video you would always gets the same fingerprint. However, when a different algorithm […]
Getting started with Videorooter API
If you’re interested in playing with our data set and helping to see how we match images and videos with the blockhash algorithms, our API is a good start, despite it being in a rough state of development. The current API supports a subset of the API calls the Elog.io API supports, at least enough such […]
Understanding Videorooter’s first video algorithm
Taking our previous experience from fingerprinting of images, combined with what we learned when looking at ContentID, we’ve developed the first rough algorithms for video fingerprinting for use in the Videorooter project. The algorithm we’ve settled on as our first one provides the baseline for any future work: it’s something to get us started, and […]
A quick look at YouTube’s ContentID
In working with Videorooter, we’ve taken a good look at the ContentID system used by YouTube to identify (potentially) infringing uses. The system has taken some criticism, not least when it identified the Creative Commons licensed movie Sintel by the Blender Foundation as infringing the copyright of Sony Pictures. Videorooter was envisioned in part to […]
Measuring & testing algorithm accuracy
One of Videorooter’s contributions to the video commons is developing algorithms to provide fingerprints of a video file. An API matches those fingerprints against videos that are openly licensed. These algorithms build on work that Commons Machinery did with fingerprinting of images in 2012-2014. This post gives the background of our work which we bring […]