[whatwg] Start position of media resources

[Jonas Sicking]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 5:30 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, David Singer wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Navigation outside the indicated range could be done in several ways -
>>> > it does not have to be through indicating the full length of the
>>> > resource in the timeline.
>>>
>>> surely.  but which one can the URL/page author expect?  If I pick an
>>> innocuous scene out of an R-rated movie and put it on a web page for
>>> children, can they easily see other parts of the movie or not?
>>
>> I think the answer to this should be "yes".
>
> I agree thus far.
>
>> For example if someone on
>> reddit links to a particular part of a video, as a user I should trivially
>> (by dragging the scrubber) be able to see the context. I don't think we
>> should be changing the timeline just because the author set a start and
>> end position somehow.
>
> I understand that this makes sense in a lot of cases - e.g. in
> something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHXuXWznFgk#t=5s .
>
> However, I would actually prefer if we make the full resource
> available in a different manner. The reason is that when you link to a
> small segment that is part of a long resource - e.g. 30 seconds out of
> a 5 hour long video - your selection on the timeline is not visible
> and it is unclear where the segment is playing and you're unable to
> scrub around the segment properly.
>
> Maybe we can introduce a toggle button that allows the timeline to
> show/hide context, in particular for long resources? Or we could
> introduce a attribute that says context="true/false" depending on what
> the page author prefers is being done with the segment? This would
> also allow to hide the context in cases such as the one that David
> described. Not that it can be completely hidden - anyone who
> understands URLs will be able to load the full resource. But it will
> make it more difficult.

If we look at how fragment identifiers work in web pages today, a link such as

http://example.com/page.html#target

this displays the 'target' part of the page, but lets the user scroll
to anywhere in the resource. This feels to me like it maps fairly well
to

http://example.com/video.ogg#t=5s

displaying the selected frame, but displaying a timeline for the full
video and allowing the user to directly go to any position.

But I also agree that there is a use case for directing the user to a
specific range of the video, such as your 30 second clip out of 5 hour
video example. Maybe this could be done with syntax like

http://example.com/video.ogg#r=3600s-3630s

At this point I agree it makes sense to by default just show a 30
second time line. But with the times showing the start time as 1h and
end time as 1h30s. And probably also UI for the user choosing to
display the full 5 hour timeline. This could even be combined with

http://example.com/video.ogg#r=3600s-3630s&t=3610s

but I'm less sure there is a use case for that.

/ Jonas