Frinkiac search engine
In case anybody needs this - from Wired magazine online
"ONE SITE. FIFTEEN seasons. Three million searchable screengrabs. This is the wonder that is Frinkiac, a compendium of Simpsons moments frozen in time, and the latest, best, most perfectly cromulent way to waste time on the Internet.
Frinkiac, named after Springfield’s favorite eccentric scientist, Professor Frink, landed on the Internet yesterday with all the subtlety of a Lard Lad Donuts mascot. And really, how could it have been anything but viral? It collects every quote from the first 15 seasons of The Simpsons, the most quotable show of the last two decades, and pairs them with screenshots from the exact moment they happened."
"We had the idea several years ago when we were quoting The Simpsons at each other all day long, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an image of the scenes we were quoting on Google,” says Sean Schulte, who created Frinkiac with Paul Kehrer and Allie Young. Though they kicked the idea around for awhile, they didn’t decide until six months or so ago to actually build it.
The work went surprisingly quickly. “The majority of the code was written in about a week, to parse the video files and upload them to the server and index them and search them,” says Schulte. From there, Young spent a few weeks developing and tweaking the UI. And thus the Frinkiac was born.
In a post describing what’s under the hood, Kehrer outlines the process by which this brilliant bit of coding generates screen captures. While he describes it as “fairly naive,” it’s also fairly brilliant. Frinkiac cuts every scene into 100 parts, takes the average color of each part, and compares its coloration to the most recently saved image. If they’re different enough, voila!, new screenshot, with minimal redundancy through the hundreds of hours of video being parsed.
To match the resulting screenshots with the right quote, Frinkiac parses subtitle files as well, and lines up time codes between words and images. Kehrer notes that season 11 has “a significant time skew problem,” making it hard to track down the precise moment Professor Frink mutters “for glaven out loud” at Lucy Lawless. A loss, but not an irredeemable one."
I know this is important stuff...
"ONE SITE. FIFTEEN seasons. Three million searchable screengrabs. This is the wonder that is Frinkiac, a compendium of Simpsons moments frozen in time, and the latest, best, most perfectly cromulent way to waste time on the Internet.
Frinkiac, named after Springfield’s favorite eccentric scientist, Professor Frink, landed on the Internet yesterday with all the subtlety of a Lard Lad Donuts mascot. And really, how could it have been anything but viral? It collects every quote from the first 15 seasons of The Simpsons, the most quotable show of the last two decades, and pairs them with screenshots from the exact moment they happened."
"We had the idea several years ago when we were quoting The Simpsons at each other all day long, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an image of the scenes we were quoting on Google,” says Sean Schulte, who created Frinkiac with Paul Kehrer and Allie Young. Though they kicked the idea around for awhile, they didn’t decide until six months or so ago to actually build it.
The work went surprisingly quickly. “The majority of the code was written in about a week, to parse the video files and upload them to the server and index them and search them,” says Schulte. From there, Young spent a few weeks developing and tweaking the UI. And thus the Frinkiac was born.
In a post describing what’s under the hood, Kehrer outlines the process by which this brilliant bit of coding generates screen captures. While he describes it as “fairly naive,” it’s also fairly brilliant. Frinkiac cuts every scene into 100 parts, takes the average color of each part, and compares its coloration to the most recently saved image. If they’re different enough, voila!, new screenshot, with minimal redundancy through the hundreds of hours of video being parsed.
To match the resulting screenshots with the right quote, Frinkiac parses subtitle files as well, and lines up time codes between words and images. Kehrer notes that season 11 has “a significant time skew problem,” making it hard to track down the precise moment Professor Frink mutters “for glaven out loud” at Lucy Lawless. A loss, but not an irredeemable one."
I know this is important stuff...
