[whatwg] metadata attribute for media

[Rick Waldron]

On Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Ralph Giles wrote:

> Back in June, I proposed[1] a new attribute to get metadata "tag" data
> out of media resources.
> 
> I've done an experimental implementation of this which is now in the
> Firefox Aurora (alpha) channel[2] and Nightly development builds.
> 
> The method is media.mozGetMetadata() and it returns a new object each
> time, whose properties are key:value pairs representing the metadata
> tags from the file. Aurora supports this for Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) streams.
> Nightly supports Opus (.opus) files as well.
> 
> Right now the method returns whatever set of tags happen to be in the
> media stream, at least if they can be interpreted as unicode text. There
> are several things I'd like to fix about this. Media formats generally
> have rules about how to map various tags to a standard vocabulary. Right
> now, web content has to implement those rules, but the user-agent is in
> a better position to do so.
> 
> Also, a number of Mozilla (C++) developers I've talked to prefer a fixed
> schema for metadata, rather than the more dynamic approach.
> 
> So, I'd like to do a new method which returns an object with a fixed
> schema we can describe in idl, representing standard fields derived from
> the dublic core tag set. The raw metadata would be available under the
> old method for advanced applications.
> 
> Some metadata is also per-track, rather than per-stream, so it makes
> sense to have these calls available on track objects as well as media
> objects.
> 
> The most essential tags are dc:creator and dc:title. That covers almost
> all player use cases. For per-track metadata, the language is perhaps
> also useful for selection purposes. Are there any other tags folks would
> like to see in the initial proposal?
> 
> -r

Will you be attending the Popcorn.js stakeholders meeting at Moz SF next week?

I'm sure all of the Popcorn.js devs (our whole core team will be there, i believe) have useful input, especially considering this is the number one requested feature and we've thought a lot about it over the last two years.

Hopefully we can combine our powers on this

Rick
 
> 
> [1]
> http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-June/036352.html
> [2] available from aurora.mozilla.org
> 
>