[ogg-dev] chaining support

[Conrad Parker]

2009/6/20 Silvia Pfeiffer <silvia at silvia-pfeiffer.de>:
> I agree, this has been a huge problem - and in fact is a problem with
> html5 <video> more generally than ogg.
>
> How do you think that a chain identifier in skeleton will make it
> possible to have e.g. a single seek bar over a stream? Would it be n
> timelines or one?
>

Chain segments with the same identifier would be treated as part of
the same content, so would be concatenated in the same seek bar. The
duration of the seek bar would be the sum of those chain segments
(contiguously having the same chain id).

A change of identifier would be a change of content and would be
treated as for a playlist (eg. a menu accessible adjacent to the
seek-bar).

More concretely: I'm proposing skeleton message header fields:

  Chain-ID
  Chain-Title

Chain-ID is a unique identifier, such as "peach-054". Chain-Title is a
human-readable string, such as "Big Buck Bunny (Trailer)". A sequence
of chain segments all having Chain-ID "peach-054" would be played in
sequence, and a conventional seek bar should make this sequence appear
to be an entire content item.

If the Chain-ID then changes (to, say "orange-315") then the seek bar
is reset for that content item. The item "Big Buck Bunny (Trailer)"
may still be accessible via a playlist menu, and selecting that would
revert the seek-bar for playback of that item.

The Chain-Title values are not authoritative, so two chains having the
same ID but different Title would still be treated as part of the same
item. A player may choose freely which of these titles to display in a
playlist (eg. use the first of the sequence).

Conrad.

> On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Conrad Parker<conrad at metadecks.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> An issue that's been cropping up recently is chaining support. We
>> discussed this a bit at FOMS 2008, and there are some open issues.
>> There was talk of making some skeleton-like metadata that spans chain
>> boundaries (or perhaps putting into skeleton a "chain identifier").
>> Other things that need to be specced out:
>>
>>  * edits vs. playlists: how to distinguish between chains that have
>> come about by removing part of an existing file, vs. a sequence of
>> completely separate files
>>  * how to present a seek bar to the user for each kind of chain, ie.
>> one timeline for the entire sequence?
>>
>> Perhaps all we need is a field in skeleton (could be a text
>> message-header field) for "sequence identifier", which identifies
>> chain sections which are part of the same edit.
>>
>> Chain sections which are just a concatenation of files to play (eg.
>> output from icecast) would be distinguished by not having the same
>> sequence id, either by explicitly having different sequence ids or by
>> not having a sequence id at all (the current case).
>>
>> Conrad.
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>
>