Video Recognizer

Manually searching for a video and timestamp in your local collection can be a tedious task. Jumping around in a long video to find a specific scene can be time-consuming and frustrating. That’s one of the reasons I created Video Recognizer.

What is Video Recognizer?

Video Recognizer is a software tool that allows you to identify a video and timestamp from your local movie collection using a single frame or screenshot.

This tool uses an AI similarity matching library to analyze the input image and match it against a database of videos, returning similar frames and their corresponding timestamps.

Clicking on a result will open a simple video player at the exact timestamp of the matched frame.

Another use case is if your collection has a lot of similar videos, like VFX shots, and you want to find the exact video and timestamp where a specific frame appears.

Inspiration

I knew someone who took a class at a university where they had to watch a lot of very old movies at home. To pass the class at the end of the semester, the professor would give them a single frame from a movie, and they had to identify the movie where that frame appeared.

The problem was that no one wanted to watch all of those old movies; they only took this class for some extra credit.

At the time, I was taking an online class on Python programming, and I thought it would be a fun project to solve this problem and practice programming.

The tool was never used in production because the teachers intentionally leaked all the answers to the students before the final exam.

Release Date

I still need to test the executable or installer versions so people can run it without having to install Python and all the dependencies. Creating a short how-to documentation is also on the to-do list before the release.

The release window for the prototype is 2026. The exact release date is not yet set, but I will provide updates on the development progress and the release date of Video Recognizer as soon as possible.

Notice

This project is in the prototype stage, there can be bugs and issues, and at this point I don’t plan to provide support for it. If you want to try it out, you can download the source code and run it in a Python environment or try the executable version, but please be aware that it may not work as expected.