Hello! For my degree tesis i´m progranmming an application that can help you. It´s actually oriented to sports to help coachs analysing matchs and rivals. It actually records on a database the time when one of the 20 predifined data ocours and allows the review of one of these data by selecting it.  With a litle bit more work it could be adapted to your needs adding a plugin with your requirements . It´s developed in c# and use gstreamer and of course it´s GPL licensed. Actually the developpment is an a beta state. Next week i´planning to publish the page of the project with the fist beta. Regards Andoni <div>2008/4/11, Etienne Toffin <<a href="mailto:etoffin@ulb.ac.be">etoffin@ulb.ac.be</a>>:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi there, I'm a PhD student in Biology, working in Brussels (Belgium). I'm looking for a dev who would have some time to spent in coding a small video app based on python and gstreamer for my lab. Here's the problem I want/have to solve… I'm working in a lab where the main interest is studying collective behaviours, such as collective food retrieval or nest digging in ants, group decision-making in cockroaches… that have already been used in several topics such as informatics (has anybody heard about ant-based algorithms ?). Such studies need two main kinds of data corresponding to the macro and micro-level of the phenomenon : collective and individual behaviours. Those data allows us to understand how complexity emerges from individuals behaviours and interactions. (THAT WAS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND) (HERE'S THE MORE TECHNICAL BACKGROUND) Basically, we make some of our measurements by using some programs to compute nest area (region- growth segmentation) or to follow big enough insects individuals trajectories (tracking) for example. However, the large majority of individual behaviours have to be measured by hand as they need "human assessment" to say wether or not the behaviour occurs (a small ant that takes a soil pellet and drop it after wandering in the experimental setup). In this case, we don't have softwares that help us in getting those informations and we have to perform a prehistoric-workflow as following : - watching the video (on a computer… we can at least do that) and waiting for a given behaviour to occur (for example an ant beginning to drink at a food source), - pausing the video when the behaviour occurs and writing the given time on a sheet, - playing again until the next awaited behaviour is seen (the ant stops drinking), then pausing and writing again the time on the sheet, - when video watching is done, entering all the values into a text file or something else… Such way of working is very tiring, boring (and all of those bad adjectives in -ing)… If you consider that what I gave to you is a simple measurements sequence and that a lot of different behaviours and measures can be needed (such as the ant cartesian coordinates when the behaviour occurs…) you can easily imagine that it's a hard and stupid work… So I thought about writing a small video program that would be an all- in-one software : - video player (with precise controls such as frame by frame playing; allowing video or image stacks playing) - keyboard shortcuts that can be easily defined for a behaviour (for example Ctrl-D for "ant begins to drink" and Ctrl-L for "ant stops drinking and leaves the food source") - mouse ability to click on the video where the behaviour occurs (to measure the cartesian coordinates) - recording of the time where shortcuts are entered and the cartesian coordinates of the ant showing the behaviour - timeline where already recorded values are shown as the video file is replayed (it's often necessary to make our measurements in several times as there can be a lot of ants to observe at once) - interface allowing video calibration : sometimes we have to film the experiment not from above and the experimental setup is then deformed on the video (circle becomes an ellipsis). Then we need a simple calibration interface to automatically convert the measured coordinates in real coordinates This software would be written with Gstreamer and Python (I've heard that it would be the best solution) and could be used on Linux, OSX and Windows. There doesn't exist any FREE software at this time and all the existing ones are quite expensive (Noldus products for those who know them). And you all know the benefits from free softwares. I know a lot of people who work with the same pre-informatic-era methods and would appreciate that kind of software… So, here are my questions : 1. is anybody here interested in writing such program ? 2. does anybody know somedy who can fullfill the question 1. condition ? Fundamental research is not only made of laboratories that have a lot of money to spend in expensive softwares and work with industries… The large majority of the labs are quite poor (considering our needs). Your help will be very very useful. Thanks for your replys, Etienne Toffin ------------------------------------------------------------------- Etienne Toffin, PhD Student Unit of Social Ecology Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 231 Boulevard du Triomphe B-1050 Brussels Belgium Tel: +32(0)2/650.55.30 Fax: +32(0)/650.59.87 Skype: etienne_titou <a href="http://www.ulb.ac.be/sciences/use/toffin.html">http://www.ulb.ac.be/sciences/use/toffin.html</a> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. 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