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Físchlár-News: User's Guide
Físchlár-News is an online archive of RTE1 daily news at 9 o'clock,
developed and maintained by Centre for Digital Video Processing, DCU.
Físchlár-News automatically records and indexes daily news and makes
available on the website for searching, browsing, and playback for students and
staff for their study/teaching/research.
This User's Guide page introduces and instructs basic how to do's of the system.
The system itself is available at: http://www.fischlar.dcu.ie/news/
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| Required Platform and Web Browser |
Físchlár-News has been configured for:
- Microsoft Windows-based PCs (Windows 95, NT, 98, 2000, XP)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer v5+
- Screen resolution at least 1024 x 768
Other specifications might work but have not been thoroughly tested. Also lower screen resolution can
be used but excessive scroll bars will appear, reducing the usability of some features of
the interface. The system uses Cascading Stylesheet (CSS), JavaScript,
Java Applets - so these features should be enabled on your web browser setting if you
use your own PC.
A small software plug-in (Oracle Video Player) needs to be installed for video playback - see
'Installing Video Player Plug-in' section below.
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| Registration & Logging-in |
Every user of the system first has to register. When you visit
Físchlár-News site (http://www.fischlar.dcu.ie/news/), the page will ask you to either
register (first time only) or log in (once registered) as the screen shot on the right shows.
For registration, click the "Register..." button, and on the following page type
in your full email address then click "Register" button. After a few seconds, you will have
received an email from the system, confirming your registration with a password - so check your
email and note the password in this email. Once you have this, you can log in to the system
by typing in your full email address and password on the Login page. Once you are logged in, you can
change your password into something more memorable - by clicking on "My Account" button on
the bottom right.
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| Installing Video Player Plug-in |
If you want to access on your own PC, you require the installation of a
small piece of software that will play the video over the network… a task that
takes about 2 minutes. If you have not used any
variation of the Físchlár system before from your PC, this means you will have to
download the Oracle Video Player plug-in to play the video (the plug-in is downloadable
from http://www.fischlar.dcu.ie/video/plugin/
… download the file and say YES or
OK to all of the questions the installation process asks). If you require some help
doing this then contact fischlar@computing.dcu.ie and we would be glad to help.
The installation will finish
with the message saying "the installation is complete". Usually you don't need to restart the
computer. Now you can play videos available on Físchlár.
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| Browsing News Archive |
Once you are logged in, you will see the list of available news programmes on the right
side of the screen, ordered reverse-chronologically (top one is the latest news).
Clicking on any of the news programmes on the listing will show the overview of that
news on the right side of the screen. This screen shows 32 images ("keyframes")
automatically extracted from the recorded news programme, to give you a rough idea about
the recorded content. This can be compared to the "scene access" feature of many DVD films on
market. Clicking any of the images will pop up the installed video player (see previous section)
and start streamed playback from the clicked point onwards. To view it in full-screen,
right-mouse click inside the player and select "Full-screen" (or a simple short-cut by Alt-Enter).
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| Browsing More Detail |
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Note the "Detail View" button beside the title - this button
will bring you to more fine-grained browsing capability... if you find the overview "scene access" feature not
much useful, try the detail view.
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Clicking on the "Detail View" will show camera shot-level details of the news, with timeline
at the top. The timeline represents the whole length of this news, and
you can click on any of the areas on the timeline to jump to that point.
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As with Overview, clicking on any of the images will pop up the player window and start
stream from that clicked point onwards.
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Notice there appears an option for different content browsers just below Detail View button. Timeline browser
is one of the 4 different style of browsing the news. Select other browsers and browse
the same news content in a way that suits your needs.
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With Slide Show browser you can browse all the extracted keyframes in the news programme one by one. Drag on the
timeline below to immediately jump to that part of the news.
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With Hierarchical browser you can view the news content in hierarchical manner. Moving mouse cursor
over one of the
images will bring down more details on that part. Next time you log in, the
system will remember which browser you left last time.
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| Searching by Closed Caption |
Físchlár-News allows searching of news programmes by Closed Caption. Type in some
query terms on the query box and click 'GO' button.
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The result will be listed
below, by the order of relevance (see Figure) - the result shows a few lines of Closed Caption
where the query terms matched and link to that news programme. Clicking on a news on
this listing will show that programme's Overview on the right side, as above. In this way,
you can use search feature to locate one news programme, and then browsing feature
to find out a particular point in that video which you want to play.
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| Forgot Your Password? |
If you forgot the password, don't worry - simply click on "Forgot
Password?" button on the first page. Físchlár system will email you with the
password in seconds. It is a good idea to change the password into something more memorable, by clicking on
"My Account" button on bottom right corner (you need to log in first to be able to change your
password).
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| Questions or Interesting Ideas? |
More technical details of the system and recent development
can be found in the Centre's website.
Feel free to send email for any questions or suggestions to
fischlar@computing.dcu.ie
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CENTRE FOR DIGITAL VIDEO PROCESSING
DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY 2009
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