Any video players (PC or Mac) that support some form of bookmarking/annotations?

December 6, 2012 11:06 AM

Any video players (PC or Mac) that support some form of bookmarking/annotations?

I'm looking to put some educational material together.

I'm looking for a video player (preferably one that can handle most codecs) that supports a list of named bookmarks where the user can click and the player jumps to that timecode.

Something like a .srt file (ie text based format) would be great.

I do not want something that plays through a browser.

Other alternative would be a player that support external control. I am thinking VLC is my best bet in this case (control via TCP) but would rather find something that has this feature built in.

posted by wongcorgi to computers & internet (3 answers total)

They never really took off, but MPEG-7 and SMIL are proposed standards for annotating videos / adding interactivity. One SMIL player I have handy is called Ambulant Player. As you can see from the website, it's kind of mid-2000s-ish, but it is one way to get where you want to go.
posted by Alterscape at 11:36 AM on December 6, 2012

Realplayer can play SMIL files along videos.

SMIL itself can be a bit complex to handle - prepare yourself to be editing XML files by hand

(This is all from memory as I have not touched a SMIL file since 2005)
posted by motdiem2 at 11:47 AM on December 6, 2012

VLC does bookmarks as part of playlists, as an XSPF file saved in the same directory as your vid. It seems kinda clunky (at least on my version), but I quickly made an "Intro" at 0:0:0, a "Chapter 1" at 4:30:00, "Chapter 2" at 07:0:0, saved these, quit, reloaded (the playlist, not the vid), and it works, though to edit, my existing bookmarks didn't appear until I hit "create" in the ManageBookmarks window.
posted by at at 11:31 AM on December 7, 2012