This is a really good idea and I’m kind of surprised no has done this yet.  The basic premise is to detect drastic scene changes in your video and mark that change as a break or a chapter in the over all video.  Then you would have a list of breaks, replete with thumbnails, that you can use to jump to various sections of your complete video.

So what phone is this awesomeness on?  iPhone? Android? WebOS???  Nope. Nokia.  Yes Nokia.

Its experimental at the moment, and credit gizmodo for the find. The app is from Nokia Beta Labs and the video is pretty cool.  Transitions are automatically detected with the scene graph experience a dramatic change.  This is not as hard as it sounds.  Simply sample the video histogram once a second and when you find a cumulative delta greater then say 50% from second to second, you would trigger a scene cut.  Natch!  Check out the video below to see it in action.

So where can we expect to see this on more common smart phones?  iPhone?  Eh, not anytime soon.  Anything that comes close to what Apple does naively gives people pause, although I could see a simple version coming out via jailbreak.  I’m thinking we would see it on Android first.

Got Nokia? You can try out Nokia Shoot & Tag on Symbian^3 and S60 5th Edition phones.

And here is the vid..