Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
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.
HN · launched Mar 24, 2026 · 438 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views
Niche: multimedia and records search engines · 74 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 74 launches in multimedia and records search engines →
Could you build this?
Yes It acts as a thin CLI wrapper around Google's Gemini Embedding 2 API and a vector store like LanceDB, SQLite-vec, or Qdrant to enable vector similarity search on video clips.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: sentinelsearch (local alternative), Anime similarity search tools
Concerns raised: 768 dimensional space insufficiency for video comparison, Privacy implications of automatic facial recognition, Thresholding challenges at scale, Cost structure concerns despite affordability
Feature requests: Local model support/integration, Thresholding improvements for scalability
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 346 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #7 of 347 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 146 days after the earliest competitor.
- Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash · ph · 2026-11-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Gemini Embedding 2 · ph · 2026-03-11 · 241 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Make AI motion videos with text · hn · 2026-02-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Agentic Video Understanding in Gemini · ph · 2026-09-06 · 209 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- ride-recap, teaching a LLM my taste to automate cycling highlights · hn · 2026-07-18 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- gemini-agentic-video · github · 2026-09-14 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Gemini Omni · ph · 2026-11-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.