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

[Jonas Sicking]

Hi Silvia,

Back in may last year I brought [1] up the fact that there are two use
cases for temporal media fragments:

1. Skipping to a particular point in a longer resource, such as
wanting to start a video at a particular point while still allowing
seeking in the entire resource. This is currently supported by for
example YouTube [2]. It is also the model used for web pages where
including a fragment identifier only scrolls to a particular point,
while allowing the user to scroll to any point both before and after
the identified fragment.

2. Only displaying part of a video. For example out of a longer video
from a discussion panel, only displaying the part where a specific
topic is discussed.

While there seemed to be agreement [3][4] that these are in fact two
separate use cases, it seems like the media fragments draft is only
attempting to address one. Additionally, it only addresses the one
that has the least precedence as far as current technologies on the
web goes.

Was this an intentional omission? Is it planned to solve use case 1
above in a future revision?

[1] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019596.html
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyQrKvc7_NU#t=201
[3] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019718.html
[4] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019721.html

/ Jonas

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 5:11 AM, 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.
>