[whatwg] Bookmarking videos

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

This is indeed a topic relevant to HTML5, but not in its scope to address.

When we developed Annodex (see
http://annodex.net/TR/draft-pfeiffer-temporal-fragments-03.txt), we
researched this topic intensively and discussed it within the URI
mailing list and here are the results in summary:

The means to do offsets into videos (both temporally and through
markers) using URIs are limited. You can only use fragment identifiers
and query identifiers on resource names for such purposes.

Fragment identifiers are not sent to the server, so when doing, e.g. a
temporal offset on a video, the server will still send the full video,
but the UA (the browser) will be able to do the offset locally. This
is useful though probably not what the general user would expect from
a temporal offset, since there is potentially a large download delay.

Query identifiers otoh are sent to the server, so they make sense to
be used for delivery of a subsection of a video from a temporal or
named offset. However, there is no means of standardisation of query
identifiers for resource classes (such as e.g. for all resources of
mime type video/*). Instead, query identifiers can only be
standardised for a specific resource type (such as e.g. for video/ogg)
by the entity that controls such specifications (e.g. Xiph for
anything in Ogg, ISO/MPEG anything in mpeg, Apple for Quicktime etc.).

Hope that helps clarify the issue.

Regards,
Silvia.


On Oct 13, 2007 8:45 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Kornel Lesinski wrote:
> >
> > This however is a little help to users who want to bookmark videos or
> > share links to certain parts of them - without a standard way of doing
> > it UA's won't be able to provide UI for it. Even if you implement that
> > for yourself using UserJS, you won't be able to share those links, etc.
>
> There are RFCs that cover fragment identifiers for videos which may be of
> interest here. I'm not sure that it's really within the scope of HTML5,
> though.
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>