Free Online Sign Dictionary - NEEDS YOUR HELP

S T Harvey, First off, I love the page! I have been using it to learn a few words. I have noticed one problem though. When you click on the US flag for ASL and the alphabet appears, the Letter "F" is shown as the letter "A". I was going through the alphabet, trying to learn it when I noticed A and F were the same.
Thanks again for the website. It s awesome!:ty:
 
Hey Simon,

I noticed you've added some overlays to the video (good idea -- showing the word and the sign at the same time). I wonder if perhaps you might be able to make the "blue and green hands" logo a bit smaller though. It gets in the way of some of the "head oriented" signs.

Thanks,

Cal
 
Simon,

FYI, when I send AVI's that are uncompressed (no codec), the conversion doesn't seem to work. If you'd like, I can send you an example so you can fool with it. I uploaded several clips before I realized they weren't playable, so I deleted them all and changed their codec back to Microsoft's MPEG-4v2, and sent them again.

Uncompressed is probably a pretty popular codec (well technically it's not a codec, but you know what I mean), so you might want to see if you can figure out what causes it. I thought I had already uploaded some that were uncompressed, and they worked, but maybe not.

--Cal
 
Calphool said:
Simon,

FYI, when I send AVI's that are uncompressed (no codec), the conversion doesn't seem to work. If you'd like, I can send you an example so you can fool with it. I uploaded several clips before I realized they weren't playable, so I deleted them all and changed their codec back to Microsoft's MPEG-4v2, and sent them again.

Uncompressed is probably a pretty popular codec (well technically it's not a codec, but you know what I mean), so you might want to see if you can figure out what causes it. I thought I had already uploaded some that were uncompressed, and they worked, but maybe not.

--Cal
Click to expand...

Scratch that.... it looks like when I select "Uncompressed" on my web cam, it actually uses the "Indeo Video 5" codec. Considering that the Indeo codec does indeed compress, I'm not altogether sure why the drop down calls this "Uncompressed", but in any case, it appears that your ffmpeg integration probably doesn't support the Indeo codecs. Not a biggie probably, I think Indeo is dying a slow death anyway....

--Cal
 
Simon,

I forgot to tell you that you can get JPG thumbnails from the videos with this:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.avi -f image2 -s 120x80 -r 0.001 outputfile.jpg

(Yeah I know, it's not very intuitive... and it doesn't work if you leave the "-f image2" thing out.)

--Cal
 
Thanks for that Calphool

I will have a play with the video overlay sometime... probably not right now though because I'm a bit busy - but the good thing about having converted to flash I can fiddle with that whenever I want without having to change any of the video files.

Thanks for your recent batch of clips!

Simon
 
Calphool, I wanted to thank you for your contributions to the dictonary. My daughter loves 'em!
 
Hi all,

Have had a bit of a play with the video overlay... let me know if you prefer it like it is?

Thanks

Simon
 
I personally liked it how it was when we started.everything else is distracting.
 
jamielee said:
I personally liked it how it was when we started.everything else is distracting.
Click to expand...

I think the text underneath is ok, but I think that the icon should just be left off. Leave it for the buttons for the first screen. I don't think it should be integrated into the signs themselves.
 
Hi Guys,

Thanks for the feedback... that's fair comment, i'll take off the icon and just leave it simple.

Thanks a lot! - the signs are really starting to build up now - good work!

Simon
 
Not me I'm afraid (i'm BSL anyway... I take it you are after ASL?)...

When you find out perhaps if you have a camera you could upload it to the dictionary, that would be great.

Thanks

Simon
 
rabbit said:
Umm... can hearies upload signs?
Click to expand...

I suspect that Simon doesn't mind if hearies sign. It's an open site, like a wikipedia type thing, so it is open to everybody. (Right, Simon?)

One thing I'd really like to see, Simon, is some kind of "PSE/SEE/ASL" checkbox on each sign. I know for sure that I'm putting both PSE and ASL signs on there, and it would be nice for learners to know the difference.

Long term, I think it would be a good idea to put a voting kind of thing into the site so that as more people use the site, we can build up a kind of "confidence level" in each sign. It would be very valuable to learners to know which signs are most recognized, vs. which signs are very regional or colloquial. For example, I know that there's a colloquial sign for "shopping" that I suspect is used only in Iowa. If I upload that sign, then I could be misleading someone from Texas for example into thinking that it's a familiar sign for their area. However, if I grew up in a small town in Iowa, I might not even know that it's colloquial. It would really really add value to the site to have that kind of information. No other web site I know about has that kind of thing, and it's a huge gap.

--Cal
 
Lillys dad said:
Calphool, I wanted to thank you for your contributions to the dictonary. My daughter loves 'em!
Click to expand...


Has your daughter seen the animals? My daughters signed most of them. It was a bit of a trick getting them to stand still and do the sign. They kept giggling and acting silly.
 
Hey Simon,

There are a number of signs that have been uploaded recently that don't play on my machine (probably a goofy codec). They weren't converted to Flash either. I suspect that the signer doesn't even know they're not working, because they probably work on his machine. You might want to check into it.

--jr
 
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