alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search
Gemini Embedding 2 can project raw video directly into a 768-dimensional vector space alongside text. No transcription, no frame captioning, no intermediate text. A query like "green car cutting me off" is directly comparable to a 30-second video clip at the vector level.
I used this to build a CLI that indexes hours of footage into ChromaDB, then searches it with natural language and auto-trims the matching clip. Demo video on the GitHub README. Indexing costs ~$2.50/hr of footage. Still-frame detection skips idle chunks, so security camera / sentry mode footage is much cheaper.
Comments
I work in content/video intelligence. Gemini is great for this type of use case out of the box.
Very interesting (not for a dashcam, but for home monitoring).
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!
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.