Hello,
I’m a PhD researcher hoping to use ELAN to transcribe and analyse various publicly available online videos.
Am I right in thinking that streaming online videos within ELAN (rather than downloading/importing them) generally isn’t possible?
I’ve had a look at some other posts on the forum and can see that media streaming is supported to an extent via RTSP - but I’m on macOS and didn’t have QuickTime installed already. Would you be able to give me a bit more info on this? It’s all quite new to me!
It would be brilliant to have this functionality in ELAN for anyone looking to transcribe publicly available videos hosted on e.g., YouTube, which are generally protected by copyright from download, despite being publicly available.
Thanks very much in advance for any advice you can give.
Erin
Hello,
In principle it is nowadays possible to annotate online videos, RTSP is not required anymore. ELAN used to test for either the file or rtsp protocol, but doesn’t do so anymore.
In the File->New... window of ELAN, there is a button Add Remote File... which will produce another window with a single text field where you can paste a URL. ELAN will pass the URL to the media player frameworks it supports (different per operating system) and see if any of them is able to play the video.
Practically it is required that you have a direct URL to the video file, e.g. something like this:
https://openbeelden.nl/files/06/38/638016.638005.WEEKNUMMER672-HRE0001C1C1.mp4
this will probably play in your ELAN if you try it. The problem with YouTube etc. videos is that you usually don’t (easily) get the URL of the video; it’s probably best to assume that if you’re not allowed to download the file, it’s also not possible to play the video outside of YouTube etc.
-Han
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