CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2012
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

TechSmith is the world leader in screen recording software with millions of users creating informational and educational content. Their content creation products generate valuable metadata that can enhance the viewing experience.

Our Mobile Smart Video Player is an iPhone/iPad application that makes use of this metadata, extending the functionality of TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio screen-capture editing software to a mobile environment. It learns what video content is most relevant by sampling each user’s tags and by displaying the optimal content to all users.

While watching a screen-capture movie using the Mobile Smart Video Player, a user can gesture to add a bookmark, an on-screen comment about the content, or a SmartFocus zooming or panning point.

Every user-generated tag is added to a database to which tags from users worldwide are constantly being added. The most commonly-placed tags are pulled from this crowd-sourced collection onto all users’ iPhones and iPads. Each individual user has the option of viewing their own data alone or the most popular crowd-sourced data from around the world.

Our Mobile Smart Video Player is written in Objective-C. Video content comes from Camtasia Studio. The XML metadata is parsed using Google libraries and is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Our player communicates with the server via the RESTful Open Data Protocol.