[whatwg] media resources: addressing media fragments through URIs spec

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 12:09 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj at opera.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:11:44 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer
> <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The W3C WG for media fragments has published a Last Call Working Draft
>> at http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/ .
>>
>> The idea of the spec is to enable addressing sub-parts of audio-visual
>> resources through URIs, such as http://example.com/video.ogv?t=10,40
>> to address seconds 10-40 out of video.ogv. This is relevant for use in
>> the <audio> and <video> elements and can help focus the playback to a
>> specific subpart.
>>
>> This specification will provide "deep linking" as a standard
>> specification for media resources.
>>
>> Incidentally, such functionality is also available at YouTube, see
>> http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=116618
>> .
>>
>> "The Working Group encourages feedback about this document by
>> developers and researchers who have interest in multimedia content
>> addressing and retrieval on the web and by developers and researchers
>> who have interest in Semantic Web technologies for content description
>> and annotation. Please send comments about this document to
>> public-media-fragment at w3.org mailing list (public archive) by 27
>> August 2010."
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Silvia.
>>
>
> I'd like to chime in here and encourage everybody to review the spec. I have
> been participating in the MF WG under the assumption that this is something
> we will couple with <video>. From an implementor perspective, the main
> (blocking) issue with the spec is that it doesn't define how to parse a MF
> URI, so I hope other potential implementors and spec-junkies will pay some
> attention to this and comment as appropriate.
>
> P.S. a more relevant example for browsers would be <video
> src="video.ogv#t=10,40">, as MF in the query component is strictly a
> server-side matter.
>
> --
> Philip Jägenstedt
> Core Developer
> Opera Software
>

Ah, bummer, apologies. That query slipped my hands - I meant to write
a URI fragment. Thanks for pointing it out, Philip.

Other examples are
spatial fragments: <video src="video.ogv#xywh=10,10,40,40"> or
track fragments: <video src="video.ogv#track=audio&track=video"> or
named fragments: <video src="video.ogv#id=couple_in_focus">

but the temporal fragments are the most important ones.

Cheers,
Silvia.