Wildlife@Home: Alpha version of new video watching interface up for testing.

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Hi Everyone, I think the new video watching interface is getting close to ready, or at least close enough to ready enough to let you all start trying it out. You can access it for different species/locations: Belden: http://volunteer.cs.und.edu/wildlife/watch2.php?species=1&location=1 Blaisdell: http://volunteer.cs.und.edu/wildlife/watch2.php?species=1&location=2 Lostwood: http://volunteer.cs.und.edu/wildlife/watch2.php?species=1&location=3 You'll probably notice there's a lot more to the interface than there was before. Also, the videos are going to be longer -- no more shorter clips -- but don't worry, the new interface saves what video you're on as well as your progress so you can leave and come back to them if you want, and it still uses your min/max video durations. The way observations are done now is also totally different. Instead of yes/no/unsure for different categories, now you can add events, and specify their start time, end time, leave comments and tag them with various additional information if need be (we're still working on adding some tags so there will be more on that later). If you click on either of the time boxes, it will automatically enter in the current time in the video for you, which should speed up doing that, you won't have to type it in manually. This obviously is going to change how validation works (and once the interface is all set I'll get to working on that), but a lot of the issues with unsure markings will go away. Either people have marked events or not. Also, accuracy is going to be redone as well. With the new interface, I'll be tracking: valid events marked invalid events marked missed events And instead of having an accuracy value that goes back to the dawn of time, it will be based on how many missed/invalid events you've marked in the last X videos (X is still undecided). So hopefully there will be less worry about accuracy, and more incentive to just mark whatever events you can find -- especially as there are now a whole lot of different events you can mark. One major thing I want to add to it before it really goes live is a way to post events in the video discussion forum. The old version just posts the entire video -- what I'd like to do here is have the option to discuss an event (which has a start and end time marked), which would then show that clip of the video in the discussion forums, kind of like how some youtube comments work. Hopefully have that up and going in a day or so, depending on whatever kinks I run into. Let me know what you think, and I'll be working on it over thanksgiving break -- it's nice to finally have some time to really sit down and devote to working on the project again. I should also have something up and running tomorrow to start re-converting all those slow loading videos. It'll take awhile to get them all converted however, but it's in the works. cheers and happy thanksgiving! --Travis

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