[whatwg] <video> element feedback

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Hi Kornel,

On 3/23/07, Kornel Lesinski <kornel at osiolki.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:53:48 -0000, Silvia Pfeiffer
> <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > About 8 years ago, we had the idea of using fragment offsets to start
> > playing from offsets of media files. However, in discussions with the
> > URI standardisation team at W3C it turned out that fragment offsets
> > are only being seen by the UA that sends them, so they will never
> > reach the web server.
>
> I think we had in mind (at least I did) URL of the page that contains the
> video, not the URL of the video file itself. Because of this indirection
> it's completly up to UA to read fragment identifier and translate it into
> appropriate HTTP request for the video file (which could use Range header
> that's more proxy-friendly than query string).

The Range header is providing for byteranges to be downloaded. There
is however no simple way to map a timerange to a byterange without
finding out about the filetype. So, in effect, if you are trying to
get a byterange, you will have to request the server to inspect the
file and to return to you a mapping of a timerange to a byterange
before you can undertake a byterange query, which can then be proxied.

This process is exactly what we suggested in
http://annodex.net/TR/draft-pfeiffer-temporal-fragments-03.txt.


> Let's say there's http://example.com/example.html page which contains
> embedded video:
> ...<video src="video.ogg">...
>
> I'd like to be able to construct URL like:
> http://example.com/example.html#@12:35
> that would cause UA to start playing the embedded video.ogg from 12:35.

That would be hard, because how would you identify which embedded
video or audio file on the example.html page this temporal offset is
referring to? Also, it could be interpreted by the UA only, since
everything after "#" will not be transferred to the server.

Regards,
Silvia.