Show HN: VAM Seek – 2D video navigation grid, 15KB, zero server load
11 hours ago (github.com)
Hi HN! I built VAM Seek because I was frustrated with 1D seek bars – you never know where you're going until you get there.
VAM Seek renders a 2D thumbnail grid next to your video. Click any cell to jump. All frame extraction happens client-side via canvas – no server processing, no pre-generated thumbnails.
- 15KB, zero dependencies - One-line integration - Works with any <video> element
Live demo: https://haasiy.main.jp/vam_web/deploy/lolipop/index.html
Would love feedback!
Client-side frame extraction is far too slow to be usable for large volumes of data.
You want to precompute the contact sheets and serve them to users. You can encode them with VP9, mux to IVF format, and use the WebCodec API to decode them in the browser (2000B-3000B per 240x135 frame, so ~3MB/hour for a thumbnail every 4 seconds). Alternatively, you can make the contact sheets with JPEG, but there are dimension restrictions, reflow is slightly fiddly, and it doesn't exploit intra-frame compression.
I made a simple Python/Flask utility for lossless cutting that uses this to present a giant contact sheet to quickly select portions of a video to extract.
> All frame extraction happens client-side via canvas – no server processing, no pre-generated thumbnails.
Doesn't that mean the client has to grab a bunch of extra data when it first opens the page, at least if the user calls up the seek feature? Since you effectively have to grab various frames from all throughout the video to generate the initial batch. It seems like it would make more sense to have server side thumbnails here as long as they're reasonably sparse and low quality.
Although I admit that one line client side integration is quite compelling.
This looks absolutely terrific if it is performative. How long does this library take to generate the thumbnails and the seek bar for e.g. a 60 minute video, on 8-year-old desktop hardware? Or on older mobile devices? For reference, my current desktop is from 2012.
The idea is very compelling, it solves a real use-case. I will definitely take inspiration from that.
However, the execution is meh. The UX is terrible (on mobile at least) and the code and documentation are an overly verbose mess. The entire project ought to fit in the size of the AI generated readme. Using AI for exploration and prototyping is fine, but you can't ship that slop mate, you need to do the polishing yourself.