[whatwg] video tag : loop for ever

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Eric Carlson <eric.carlson at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 15, 2008, at 2:46 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 8:21 AM, Eric Carlson <eric.carlson at apple.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think you misunderstood what I was (trying to) say. I mean that it is
>>> very difficult to implement looping cleanly in *JavaScript* because of
>>> callback latency, single threaded interpreters, etc.
>>
>> Yes, sorry, I missed the "in script" part.
>>
>> I still don't think it's that hard to do in javascript either. There
>> may be a pause between the file finishing playing and starting again
>> because the media subsystem has to finish decoding, possibly be
>> unloaded and reloaded and then re-load the codec setup before being
>> able to play it back again. But since this should be an interim
>> solution until the media subsystem is brought up-to-date, it's
>> probably acceptable.
>>
>  It sounds like we agree that looping *can* definitely be implemented in
> JavaScript, but that it can be very difficult to do so without
> visible/audible artifacts.
>
>  I am not sure what you are saying about whether or not the media element
> should have an attribute to control looping. Are you saying that low-latency
> looping isn't a requirement so we don't need an attribute, or are you saying
> that we should have an attribute but we might not get low-latency looping
> with some media engines right now? Or are you saying something else
> completely?

I like the simple boolean loop attribute.

I am not sure we need loopStart and loopEnd, since we have start and
end to reduce the looping to a segment. I would like to avoid going
down the SMIL path and creating markup that defines interactive
presentation - rather it should just be a video file (or segment) that
we do stuff to - not multiple segments that we need to synchronise and
sequence etc.

As for playCount - I am unsure if aside from a boolean loop attribute
we really need to enable the page author to specify how often a
video/audio should be viewed/heard. Once, possibly with autoplay, and
on loop should be enough for an author. I cannot see a use case for a
fixed number of views, but am happy to be told otherwise.

Silvia.