So James has written a very enthusiastic & spot on piece about Annodex, the open source technology from CSIRO that allows you to annotate and index multimedia files (using patent and royalty free codecs, though legacy non-free ones like MPEG-1 are usable in the short term).

I was lucky enough to be at both the presentation and fixit session for Annodex at LCA 2004 and have to say it sounded like an excellent technology, one that is long overdue and badly needed.

The ability to hyperlink into a given time range of a media file and then have just that segment sent to you (rather than having to get everything up to that range, or even worse, the entire file) is, I believe, perhaps its strongest feature.

I made a heap of notes in the presentation, but they’re at work and I’m not, so I can’t make any more comments about what occurred to me about it’s other possible uses..