[whatwg] media elements: Relative seeking

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Maik Merten <maikmerten at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Silvia Pfeiffer schrieb:
>> In any case - if you (and also Chris Double) are satisfied with the
>> estimates you're getting for file duration/length - I'll stop arguing
>> for it. It would be nice to hear some experimental evidence about how
>> well it's doing, e.g. for typical movie trailers, so we can lay that
>> argument to bed knowing we've done our homework.
>
> I now also account for the bytes in the buffer to compute the current
> playback byte-position and added a status bar showing playback progress.
>
> http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/demos/bigbuckbunny-applet-javascript.html
>
> Given that I estimate the duration with outrageous crudeness (no
> averaging) and also compute the slider position without any means to
> ensure it doesn't jump around wildly I think it's pretty smooth - so
> perhaps estimating the duration is in fact a viable fallback if one
> doesn't want to determine the duration "properly".

Nice work!

The duration is indeed jumping quite a bit between 8min and 12 min and
even at the end still has a gap of actual end time of 9m54s while the
estimate is still at 10m44s. Players like YouTube's player display the
duration of the file which is very useful for a consumer to estimate
if they actually have the time to spend on watching the video. So,
even if we don't use the duration/length attribute for calculating the
timeline, it may well be useful metadata for display purposes.

BTW: are you planning to implement seeking on the timeline, too? It
would probably not too bad given the smoothness of the slider
position.

Cheers,
Silvia.