[whatwg] HTML5 Video - Issue and Request for improvment

[Lubomir Toshev]

We were trying to add support for subtitles for our player control that uses
video tag as its base. There are two popular subtitle formats *.srt which
uses currentTime to show the subtitles where they should be. Like 0:01:00 -
0:01:30 - "What a nice hotel." While the other popular format is *.sub which
uses the currentFrame to show the proper subtitles. Like {45600}, {45689} -
"What a nice hotel". And if I want to add this support it would be good if
video tag exposes currentFrame, so that I can show properly the subtitles in
a span positioned over the video. Now does it make more sense?

I know video will have embedded subtitle support, but I think that it should
be flexible enough to allow building such features like the one above. What
do you think? To me this is worth adding because, it should be really easy
to implement?

Thanks,
Lubo

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Carlson [mailto:eric.carlson at apple.com] 
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2011 6:21 AM
To: Lubomir Toshev
Cc: whatwg at whatwg.org
Subject: Re: [whatwg] HTML5 Video - Issue and Request for improvment


On Jan 29, 2011, at 3:21 AM, Lubomir Toshev wrote:

> Another thing that I see as a limitation is that video should expose API
for
> currentFrame, so that when control developers want to add support for
> subtitles on their own, to be able to support formats that display the
> subtitles according to the current video frame. This is a limitation to
the
> current design of the video tag.
> 
  I don't understand what you are suggesting, what would "currentFrame"
return and how exactly would you use it?

eric