Unfortunately, unless that video has already been geo-tagged, it can often be very difficult to tell where it was shot. Now, however, scientists have created algorithms that can determine a video's location by comparing its background imagery and audio to that of thousands of other videos.

The researchers, from Spain's Ramón Llull University, utilized the existing MediaEval Placing Task database. It's a collection of videos and photos from known locations, used for developing geolocation software.

Given that the videos being scrutinized presumably wouldn't show well-known landmarks, the algorithms instead look for distinct images in seemingly generic scenes (such as streets or wilderness areas) that have a match in the database.

Random ambient audio also plays a key role. "The acoustic information can be as valid as the visual and, on occasions, even more so when it comes to geolocating a video," said researcher Xavier Sevillano. "In this field we use some physics and mathematical vectors taken from the field of recognition of acoustic sources, because they have already demonstrated positive results."