[whatwg] HTML5 video: frame accuracy / SMPTE

[Glenn Maynard]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Rob Coenen <coenen.rob at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi David- that is b/c in an ideal world I'd want to seek to a time expressed
> as a SMPTE timecode (think web apps that let users step x frames back, seek
> y frames forward etc.). In order to convert SMPTE to the floating point
> value for video.seekTime I need to know the frame rate.

I'd suggest that you don't want to know the "framerate"; rather, you
want a separate seek call to seek using timecodes directly.

Please don't dismiss video formats with variable framerates under
assumptions like "nobody's using them in webpages right now".  That's
shortsighted, and can only lead to an API that will fall apart in a
couple years.

(Being able to seek to "the next frame" is by itself obviously useful,
even outside of editing applications, to allow users to single-step
videos as you can in any native video player.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard