

Show HN: Vhoto – Find photos in your videos - cookingrobot
http://vho.to/gettheapp/davem

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cookingrobot
One of the best ways to be a better photographer is to take more pictures.
Vhoto's a camera that takes that idea to the extreme..

By shooting a video instead of just one shot, you have a better chance of
getting that perfect moment.

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cookingrobot
And on a more personal note.. photography's been a huge hobby of mine for a
long time. So it's been a ton of fun working on a new kind of camera.

Would love to get your feedback! Both about what's there now in version 1, and
where you would like to see this go in the future..

Thanks

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nostromo
1\. You guys should make a Google Glass app. It could be always on and
automatically record the salient moments of an event - without me ever taking
a picture.

2\. You could make an auto-Leibovitz mode that picks each person's best face
and merges them into a single photo.

3\. Gifs!

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cookingrobot
I love it :) Auto-Leibovitz is a great name too.

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kingnight
Great name & domain. Excited to try this, but I can't imagine the IQ being
worth keeping.

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cookingrobot
Thanks! Try it out and let me know what hit/missed. There are a surprising
number of techniques for affecting IQ on iOS, so specific feedback is great.

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kingnight
First thing I would suggest is to work on the onboarding, specially wrt
requesting user's device features. 4 straight modal dialogs is a big turnoff,
and makes the app feel more nefarious than it probably is.

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vertis
Was excited about the concept, but (a) don't have an iPhone, and (b) would
love to be able to do it on my desktop with existing videos...

Great idea though.

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Geee
Why do I have to sign up? Why is there need for a social network for this app,
I just don't get it. It would have worked beautifully just as an isolated app.
I actually would love to find great photos in my videos. I was really excited
about the idea, but having to sign up and reading your privacy statement about
getting all my video data made me delete the app.

Please someone make a copy of this without all the bullshit.

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ipince
for cookingrobot:

Just letting you know that I agree with this comment's point (though not its
tone).

Could this be made available without all the social and sharing stuff? :)
Maybe after you build your user base you can open source it? (free for people
like us but not jeopardizing your competitive advantage since you already have
the network)

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cookingrobot
Totally hear the sentiment in the comment. For our V1 release we wanted to
have good social and community features, because that really how you win over
super-users for this kind of an app.

So we wanted to make sure everyone using the app was able to get that full
experience. There's lots of room for experimenting with other approaches, but
so far users seem to be really like that side of the experience too.

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omtinez
I don't see the point of this with newer generation cameras. Almost all
drivers nowadays support the "photo burst" mode where you take a single photo
and the driver gives you back X frames before and after the fact (at full
resolution). I think Nokia calls it Perfect Shot

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ipince
I may have missed this on the site, but how do you choose a particular frame?
I know that's kind of your "secret sauce" but I'm curious..

Frame blurriness, faces and smiles, balance.. what else?

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th0br0
So... a camera app for recording with a full-frame codec with low-res so that
speed & filesize are kept low?

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cookingrobot
It may sound weird.. but these kind of tradeoffs work to our advantage. There
are fundamental limits to performance, filesize, bandwidth that everyone has
to deal with. The fact that it's such a high-dimensional space means we can
find a niche and optimize for cases that current cameras are missing.

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th0br0
Sorry, the comment wasn't meant as criticism. Just wanted to know what the
actual product / tech was ;)

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cookingrobot
I see :) Yeah, it sounds like you understand the different kind of approaches
that are available here. It's fun to sort of 'misuse' some of these
technologies.

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niico
Why not pause the video and take a screenshot of it?

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georgemcbay
I have no idea if this app does this (I don't think it does; it seems to just
detect motion blurred frames and discard those as good candidates), but you
can actually pull a lot more detail/sharpness out using multi-frame super-
resolution algorithms over a series of frames (even if there is movement from
frame to frame) rather than just pulling the video codec data out for one
frame.

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Goopplesoft
Interesting, sounds like VNC in reverse [1]. Are there any solutions to this
out there? Seems like it'd be a smart way to boost a video stream.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing#Opera...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing#Operation)

