GitHub - Olow304/memvid: Video-based AI memory library. Store millions of text chunks in MP4 files with lightning-fast semantic search. No database needed.
github.com
Video-based AI memory library. Store millions of text chunks in MP4 files with lightning-fast semantic search. No database needed. - Olow304/memvid

I stumbled upon that new use of mp4 format. Interesting.

  • Revered_Beard@lemmy.world
    3·
    22 hours ago

    tl;dr - By using this very strange file format, you can functionally have access to the vast power of a vector database, but with the local simplicity of sqlite.

    If I’m understanding this correctly: if you wanted to do a simple search for exact text strings, and that was all that you needed, then yes, you should probably use something like an sqlite database to index and query from.

    However, if you are working with massively large data sets, and you need a vector database (for contextual or semantic searches) - well, that’s a next level tier of complexity. At that point, you need a vector database server.

    What this thing does, however, is format your data into what they call “video” (but realistically would probably look like static if you were to actually play it in VLC). Then…

    … I think it’s hooking into some similarities between vector databases and video processing, and then using the mature video processing technology to process the “video” at lightning-fast speeds. And you get all of that contextual power without relying on a cloud-based vector database server.

    (To be clear, I’m doing a lot of hand-waving over the “similarities between vector databases and video processing” here - perhaps somebody with a computer science degree, or an autistic savant, can explain why this works the way that it does.)