Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search

This is a really cool implementation—embeddings still often feel like magic to me. That said, this exact use case is sort of also my biggest point of concern with where AI takes us, much more so than most of the common AI risks you hear lots of chatter about. We live in a world absolutely loaded with cameras now but ultimately retain some semblance of semi-anonymity/privacy in public by virtue of the fact that nobody can actually watch or review all of the video from those cameras except when there is a compelling reason to do so, but these technologies are making that a much more realistic proposition.

The presence of cameras everywhere is considerably more concerning than the status quo, to me at least, when there is an AI watching and indexing every second of every feed—where camera owners or manufacturers or governments could set simple natural language parameters for highly specific people or activities notify about. There are obviously compelling and easy-to-sell cases here that will surely drive adoption as it becomes cost effective: get an alert to crime in progress, get an alert when a neighbor who doesn't clean up after his dog, get an alert when someone has fallen...but the potential implications of living in a panopticon like this if not well regulated are pretty ugly.

I picked up a Rexing dash cam a few months back and after getting frustrated with how clunky it is to get footage of it, I decided to look into building something out myself to browse and download the recordings without having to pull the SD card. While scrolling through the recordings, I explicitly remember thinking it would be nice to just describe what I was looking for and run a search. Looking forward to incorporating this into my project.

Thanks for sharing!

Could this be used for creating video editing software?

Imagine a Premiere plugin where you could say "remove all scenes containing cats" and it'll spit out an EDL (Edit Decision List) that you can still manually adjust.

Very interesting (not for a dashcam, but for home monitoring).

I work in content/video intelligence. Gemini is great for this type of use case out of the box.

Where is the Exit to this dystopia?

What is your experience so far with the quality of the retrieved pieces?

Very impressive! A webhook could be configured to trigger an alarm if a semantic match to any category of activities is detected, and then you basically have a virtual security guard and private investigator. Well played.

What a brilliant idea! is this all done locally? That's incredible.

Does anyone know of an open weights models that can embed video? Would love to experiment locally with this.

That's quite interesting, well done! I haven't thought of this use case for embeddings. It open the door to quite many potential applications!

Nice use of native video embedding. How do you handle cases where Gemini's response confidence is low? Do you have a fallback or threshold?

> No transcription, no frame captioning, no intermediate text.

If there is text on the video (like a caption or wtv), will the embedding capture that? Never thought about this before.

If the video has audio, does the embedding capture that too?

Today I learned that Gemini can now natively embed video..

Cool Project, thanks for sharing!

very cool, anybody have apparent use cases for this?

why not skip the text conversion? is it usable at all?

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