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Show HN: Vhoto – Find photos in your videos

36 points| cookingrobot | 12 years ago |vho.to

26 comments

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[+] cookingrobot|12 years ago|reply
One of the best ways to be a better photographer is to take more pictures. Vhoto's a camera that takes that idea to the extreme..

By shooting a video instead of just one shot, you have a better chance of getting that perfect moment.

[+] cookingrobot|12 years ago|reply
And on a more personal note.. photography's been a huge hobby of mine for a long time. So it's been a ton of fun working on a new kind of camera.

Would love to get your feedback! Both about what's there now in version 1, and where you would like to see this go in the future..

Thanks

[+] ngokevin|12 years ago|reply
But at a low resolution and at a slow framerate.
[+] kingnight|12 years ago|reply
Great name & domain. Excited to try this, but I can't imagine the IQ being worth keeping.
[+] cookingrobot|12 years ago|reply
Thanks! Try it out and let me know what hit/missed. There are a surprising number of techniques for affecting IQ on iOS, so specific feedback is great.
[+] vertis|12 years ago|reply
Was excited about the concept, but (a) don't have an iPhone, and (b) would love to be able to do it on my desktop with existing videos...

Great idea though.

[+] Geee|12 years ago|reply
Why do I have to sign up? Why is there need for a social network for this app, I just don't get it. It would have worked beautifully just as an isolated app. I actually would love to find great photos in my videos. I was really excited about the idea, but having to sign up and reading your privacy statement about getting all my video data made me delete the app.

Please someone make a copy of this without all the bullshit.

[+] apu|12 years ago|reply
While you make a valid point (for some people), please try to be more civil.

Remember that a real person spent time & energy working on writing and releasing this app. You likely wouldn't say your last sentence to this person in real life, so please refrain from writing it here.

[+] ipince|12 years ago|reply
for cookingrobot:

Just letting you know that I agree with this comment's point (though not its tone).

Could this be made available without all the social and sharing stuff? :) Maybe after you build your user base you can open source it? (free for people like us but not jeopardizing your competitive advantage since you already have the network)

[+] omtinez|12 years ago|reply
I don't see the point of this with newer generation cameras. Almost all drivers nowadays support the "photo burst" mode where you take a single photo and the driver gives you back X frames before and after the fact (at full resolution). I think Nokia calls it Perfect Shot
[+] ipince|12 years ago|reply
I may have missed this on the site, but how do you choose a particular frame? I know that's kind of your "secret sauce" but I'm curious..

Frame blurriness, faces and smiles, balance.. what else?

[+] th0br0|12 years ago|reply
So... a camera app for recording with a full-frame codec with low-res so that speed & filesize are kept low?
[+] cookingrobot|12 years ago|reply
It may sound weird.. but these kind of tradeoffs work to our advantage. There are fundamental limits to performance, filesize, bandwidth that everyone has to deal with. The fact that it's such a high-dimensional space means we can find a niche and optimize for cases that current cameras are missing.
[+] niico|12 years ago|reply
Why not pause the video and take a screenshot of it?
[+] georgemcbay|12 years ago|reply
I have no idea if this app does this (I don't think it does; it seems to just detect motion blurred frames and discard those as good candidates), but you can actually pull a lot more detail/sharpness out using multi-frame super-resolution algorithms over a series of frames (even if there is movement from frame to frame) rather than just pulling the video codec data out for one frame.
[+] cookingrobot|12 years ago|reply
We talk to people who totally do that. They're the perfect proto-users who get why this is useful.

The Vhoto app just makes that easier, and helps jump to interesting / distinct / clear frames. You can do it entirely by hand by trying to scrub to the right frame, but point of the app (and the computer vision algos behind it) is to make it easy and do most of the work for you.

[+] _zen|12 years ago|reply
That may work for 1 video and a few stills. Now try hundreds of videos and stills. I sure as hell don't want to wade through that.