ELAN

ELAN is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources. With ELAN, a user can add an unlimited number of annotations to audio and/or video streams.

An annotation can be a sentence, word or gloss, a comment, translation or a description of any feature observed in the media. Annotations can be created on multiple layers, called tiers. Tiers can be hierarchically interconnected. An annotation can either be time-aligned to the media or it can refer to other existing annotations.

The textual content of annotations is always in Unicode and the transcription is stored in an XML format.ELAN provides several different views on the annotations, each view is connected and synchronized to the media playhead. Up to 4 video files can be associated with an annotation document. Each video can be integrated in the main document window or displayed in its own resizable window.

ELAN delegates media playback to an existing media framework, like Windows Media Player, QuickTime or JMF (Java Media Framework). As a result a wide variety of audio and video formats is supported and high performance media playback can be achieved.

ELAN is written in the Java programming language. It relies on platform specific media frameworks for media playback. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. All Software developed by TLA may be used free of charge (freeware). It is also ‘open source’: the source code is available upon request under the Gnu Public License 2 (in some cases GPL 3).