If you look at one paper from the CHI2008 conference, look at "Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation". The conference is the place where innovation in computer-human interaction is presented each year.

Video and more documentation available at
http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/

A small video is available here:
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~bonzo/index.html

The idea of this system was developed by four groups in parallel, without being aware of each other (in the beginning) ... the other paper was "DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation"

Abstract:
We present a method for browsing videos by directly dragging their content. This method brings the benefits of direct manipulation to an activity typically mediated by widgets. We show that this method can out-perform the traditional seeker bar in video browsing tasks that focus on visual content rather than time.


I wish they would put the system demo video on youtube. I have both the paper and the video on the proceedings, but its up to the authors to publish this. - just saw the project homepage