Making 370 Hours of Archival Video Searchable with VLMs for $10
vanstriendaniel · x · 2026-07-31
The author shared a practical project using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to make video archives searchable by on-screen actions. He processed 1,864 public-domain films from the Prelinger Archives, cutting them into 60-second chunks and indexing them using an open-source 2B parameter video model.
Building the entire index for 370 hours of video cost only about $10 in GPU time. The pipeline allows for highly specific semantic searches, such as querying "typing on a computer keyboard" to jump directly to the exact moment in the footage.
Related event: AI Makes 370 Hours of Public Domain Films Searchable for $10(3 posts)→
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