Great idea and very promising application. I've exported my favourite tracks via foobar2000 and last.fm statistics via softplaylist plugin (it creates XPSF playlist) et voila! my videoplaylist was created en instant.
That is a good idea! Like Google advertising, where the ads are selected based on the textual context -- words in your search string or email or website -- but instead of ads as the output, short video clips. For long text blocks, run the videos alongside a scrolling reader such that the video and text stay synchronized. The word "respect" prompts an Aretha Franklin clip, maybe. Appeal to the [people who think they are] multitaskers! You'll have nerd users searching for which Shakespearean passages lead to the most amusing clip playlist!
If the video bandwidth is all Youtube's, and the UI is Javascript, your ongoing cost is mostly the server time to run the text against your corpus and spit out a playlist.
I love when startup ideas spring from a misinterpretation of how someone else summarizes their product.
very nice idea! would be nice if we could type out playlist in textboxes and then open them via roll.io so that those boxes are easy to emded in forums when someone wants to list out a few viddys without going to youtube to expressedly look & link for them.
Great idea, but definitely needs a better explanation as I misunderstood it at first. Obviously the next step is allowing users to save their playlists.
I really like this, I had a similar idea a few years ago with 'YouLink' - essentially solving the playlist problem of YouTube - but I didn't think of making such a simple and clean execution. Mine was more Youtube meets iTunes style - pre Spotify days.
Plus back then, bandwidth was not so great / YouTube often buffered causing breaks in the music. So I abandoned the project.
However Roll.io is a great solution, often I have the situation where I have a track listing for something that I can find individual songs for on youtube, but need to quickly make a playlist out of it, but don't due to the horrible youtube playlist interface.
This is especially true when it comes to 'Remixed' music where the songs have particular unique names. e.g. http://roll.io/#4fvjsj!0
Thanks for making it. The only request I would have would be to automatically remove or recognise track listing numbers at the start of the tracks.
E.g. if I copy a track listing I often have:
1. SongA
2. SongB
3. SongC
4. SongD
- It is a slight pain to manually remove the 1., 2., 3., 4. from the front and may cause incorrect matching on the songs if I leave them on.
Very useful. I always wished for something like this.
I was a little disappointed to see that it didn't work on the iPad, though. The page just tells me (in grey text on a black background btw) that the flash player is needed, although embedded YouTube videos usually work without the need for flash on this thing.
just thought of something else. It would be quite cool if we could direct roll.io to play files via url parameter. Say we want to play 3 songs. We could type something like this in a forum:
This is a great idea, and amazing for previewing new albums! However, sometimes when it fails to search and substitutes, it would be nice to be able to hand edit the playlist.
I second this. It's crass and unnecessary and just makes me look at it.. i dunno... differently.
And because of that -- and only that -- I would never see myself sharing this with people or using it to send video playlists to people aside from some anonymous web forum.
Seriously, though, I'm not one to be easily offended -- and I think fake umbrage in our society has been taken to a ridiculous level (especially in politics). But the reason I like good design is because when something is well designed it gives me a sense of calm and peace. Having "I eat text and shit out whatever" is just very bad design to me.
And it's offensive enough that why would I risk offending somebody? Why do I care enough about the site to take on that risk?
I'm not one to be easily offended either, but I am also less likely to share this with my 12 year old daughter who really likes to explore youtube. Of course all she plays is that bieber kid, some kid named cody and lady gaga.
I wonder why everyone seems to get what this does from reading the description. When I read "eat and shit", I assume that the "food" is "transformed" into ... youtube videos. So I thought this would generate new videos and upload them to youtube automatically, maybe showing the txt files as a huge StarWars scroller, or something.
This is also exactly what I thougth (with the starwars scroller and all!), but the website is pretty self explainatory once you visited it and cliqued "enter txt" link.
For this particular link I'm not sure I would have clicked it with the text you suggest. And I'm glad I did click it. But I agree that in the general case, titles on HN should be accurate rather than catchy.
Yeah, I had uploaded the first 10 chapters of Moby Dick, all along thinking "what is this annoying video playing," before realizing it doesn't do a StarWars scroller.
107 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadIt's nice what you've done, just wasn't my first reaction to the Show HN text.
This is the result of a tiny hackathon. We wanted to listen to the old playlists of Woxy.com
If the video bandwidth is all Youtube's, and the UI is Javascript, your ongoing cost is mostly the server time to run the text against your corpus and spit out a playlist.
I love when startup ideas spring from a misinterpretation of how someone else summarizes their product.
Empty lines are currently displayed and link to a random video. A quick improvement would be to just skip these empty lines.
1. We have the 'hide video' options, can we please have 'hide list' option which makes video bigger?
2. Can we have the 'always select best quality' switch?
With these features roll.io would make it to my favorite music players list.
Plus back then, bandwidth was not so great / YouTube often buffered causing breaks in the music. So I abandoned the project.
However Roll.io is a great solution, often I have the situation where I have a track listing for something that I can find individual songs for on youtube, but need to quickly make a playlist out of it, but don't due to the horrible youtube playlist interface.
This is especially true when it comes to 'Remixed' music where the songs have particular unique names. e.g. http://roll.io/#4fvjsj!0
Thanks for making it. The only request I would have would be to automatically remove or recognise track listing numbers at the start of the tracks.
E.g. if I copy a track listing I often have: 1. SongA 2. SongB 3. SongC 4. SongD
- It is a slight pain to manually remove the 1., 2., 3., 4. from the front and may cause incorrect matching on the songs if I leave them on.
I was a little disappointed to see that it didn't work on the iPad, though. The page just tells me (in grey text on a black background btw) that the flash player is needed, although embedded YouTube videos usually work without the need for flash on this thing.
http://roll.io/song1title-song2title-song3title
With '-' as delimiter or some other char/word
And because of that -- and only that -- I would never see myself sharing this with people or using it to send video playlists to people aside from some anonymous web forum.
Seriously, though, I'm not one to be easily offended -- and I think fake umbrage in our society has been taken to a ridiculous level (especially in politics). But the reason I like good design is because when something is well designed it gives me a sense of calm and peace. Having "I eat text and shit out whatever" is just very bad design to me.
And it's offensive enough that why would I risk offending somebody? Why do I care enough about the site to take on that risk?
'Show HN: roll.io plays youtube videos searching list of text. Useful?'
That aside, neat app. It's a clever tagline though.
I hope this idea stays as focused and bloat-free as it is right now, I just love it.