Playlists and Gapless Playback

Monday FOMS / Hack Day

Session Facilitator: tracey jaquith ((tra@tracey_pooh) from Internet Archive)

mark boas (jplayer.org) (@maboa twitter)
has some exciting ideas on word-only playback of audio/video; mashing up; editing video/audio using text alone (for example, move words around

ben moskovitz and tracey (@tracey_pooh twitter) and mark talked about "ransom videos" -- sending text of a video script or written work (eg: short story) and then have it play search results for the pieces of text, alternating between speakers/video sources (similar to a "ransom note" of cutup words/text glued to a page to convey a wider meaning)

jan (http://pan.do/ra) gapless playlisting all sorts of awesome stuff

michale dale (wikimedia + kaltura) talked with eric carlson from apple about an iOS way to start buffering a 2nd video while another is playing (this is already possible in browsers using JS and best practices are 2-3 video tags where one is playing, the next clip is loading but not showing/playing). The iOS technique is to use a 2nd <video> tag w/ CSS visibility:hidden and then toggle the two <video> tags' visibility but not quite working yet on iPad.

tom stroll (strollmedia.com) had some ideas for using things like google goggles to determine metadata about each frame of a video as another way to find/match videos to text

george chriss (@openmeetings twitter) -- would like to bump the priority up of this but doesn't directly hold him back now

CONCLUSIONS:

  • unlikely to get video JS frameworks to come up with a direct unified API.
  • So instead, have video javascript libraries:
    • support media element spec JS methods (eg: play() pause() seek()) and extend/customize/theme them as needed
    • MRSS seems best and most flexible (supports content groups) way to express playlists. beetween JS methods and MRSS, that could be used as the common denominators for content providers/webauthors to allow them to try / swap out different video js libraries/frameworks.
  • Even simpler M3U in some circumstances may make sense as well