[whatwg] re-thinking "cue ranges"

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 22:00 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Philip Jgenstedt wrote:
> > > 
> > > What are the use cases you think are basic? It's unclear to me what 
> > > isn't being solved. Here's one use case, a slide deck:
> > 
> > The most obvious use case in my mind is displaying captions/subtitles.
> 
> I'd much, much ratio subtitles were done by the user agent natively based 
> on captions actually included in the video data. We shouldn't rely on 
> authors to provide accessibility features.

Given how unreliable embedded subtitles tend to be in desktop media
players (at least in my experience) I think it's very likely someone
will write an JavaScript SRT parser library to use with this API rather
than hoping that the embedded subtitles can be reliably detected in all
different combinations of media frameworks and browsers. I guess
standardizing on an embedded caption/subtitle format might be possible
after we actually have decided on baseline codecs though...

> Having said that, changing the code I gave in my last e-mail to support 
> captions is pretty trivial -- simply add an "exit" callback that empties 
> the current subtitles display. The rest is basically the same.

Indeed, I expect that some would even abuse the id parameter to pass the
caption text directly, although that isn't very elegant.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Opera Software