FLV video triggering cue events

While waiting for a colleague to do his thing I actually managed to get some time to do a bit of research and development for a change - namely something I've been wanting to try for about 4 years almost.

When working for Spain Homes and shooting footage of a property in Santa Ponsa - Mallorca, I returned to the UK hoping to make a nice video tour of a property, accompanied by salient information about each detail at the relevant parts of the video timeline.

This was something of course that I always knew Flash could do since Flash Pro 8 came out, but as usual workload prevented me from ever trying it unfortunately, and oh yeah, I walked out of that company (thats another long story).

So fast-forward 3 and a bit years and 2 full time jobs later and I'm once again revisiting the technique - this time there's an upcoming (albeit secret for now) reason for using this technology again. Lets just say it involves HD video ;) and interactivity for events (as per usual for Red Digital's client base), and an innovative (although not new idea) and something obvious that I've realised nobody seems to be trying commercially with the tech yet - which equals a big market leading opportunity for Red Group in the event space.

So I did some experiments - using a video of the brilliant Hannibal movie title sequence and set cue points to trigger subtitles e.g. "pidgeon" and "police" - its pretty easy with a few switch and case statements to show a photo of a pidgeon and information when this happens rather than my test subtitle messages obviously.

So with this in mind - my challenge now is to make H264 video trigger events - or at least try and encode FLV HD video to a similar quality for local (Hard Drive) playback for an exhibition display and do something similar.

Even if I can't achieve the same metadata based time cue triggers - which are the obvious way of doing it - There is always the possibility that its impossible to actually embed metadata into a H264 stream as you can with FLV,

Otherwise it can be done by monitoring the video playback steam status - and is a technique I've done before (e.g.  has playback reached 3:04:01)

Only more R&D time and more experiments coupled with a bit of targetted googling will reveal all...