[whatwg] video tag : loop for ever

[Eric Carlson]

On Oct 16, 2008, at 9:24 AM, Dr. Markus Walther wrote:

>
> Eric Carlson wrote:
>>  I agree that it is more work to implement a custom controller, but  
>> it
>> seems a reasonable requirement given that this is likely to be a
>> relatively infrequent usage pattern.
>
> How do you know this will be infrequent?
>
   Of course I don't *know* that 'start' and 'end' attributes will be  
used infrequently, but I suspect it based on my experience helping  
developers with the QuickTime plug-in. It has had 'startTime' and  
'endTime' attributes for almost ten years, but they are not commonly  
used.

>>  Or do you think that people will frequently want to limit playback  
>> to
>> a section of a media file?
>
> Yes, I think so - if people include those folks working with
> professional audio/speech/music production. More specifically the
> innovative ones among those, who would like to see audio-related web
> apps to appear.
>
> Imagine e.g. an audio editor in a browser and the task "play this
> selection of the oscillogram"...
>
> Why should such use cases be left to the Flash 10 crowd
> (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/dynamic_sound_generation.html)?
>
> I for one want to see them become possible with open web standards!
>
   I am anxious to see audio-related web apps appear too, I just don't  
think that including 'start' and 'end' attributes won't make them  
significantly easier to write.

> In addition, cutting down on number of HTTP transfers is generally
> advocated as a performance booster, so the ability to play sections  
> of a
> larger media file using only client-side means might be of independent
> interest.
>
   The 'start' and 'end' attributes, as currently defined in the spec,  
only limit the portion of a file that is played - not the portion of a  
file that is downloaded. If you are interested in clients requesting  
and playing media fragments, you might want to look at the W3C Media  
Fragments Working Group [1] which is investigating this issue.

eric

[1] http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments