I am cc'ing the metavid dev list,
in terms of duration... the stream db entry needs to know that info ie duration should be stored in the DB .. it won't have any way of validating the text transcripts contributed are in range without duration. If operating mv_embed in "stand alone mode" then maybe the approach you mention is applicable... but i would use null or 'undefined' over 0 since what if a clip that is part of a sequence is .4s long and then we round down or something bad happens. (ie we should do what the whatwg recommends for that value)
fast forwarding is a bad idea.. if the client plugin does not support revealing how much of the video is been download / available for a local seek... you should just issue a url update and remote seek. That php media segment script should do that for flv no? If no stream server is available (ie using mv_embed in stand alone mode) then try using the plugin seek function (ie client side http seeking) if that does not work maybe lock the seeking bar and don't allow it? Fast forwarding is just going to confuse people.
Switching the "update_url" call to a direct play call seems like a bad idea because we use the update stream src url in many cases where we don't necessarily want to play... if you do add that function in you will probably want to keep the older function and only put in the new call where appropriate and ofcourse do lots of testing ;)
--michael
Stjepan Rajko wrote:
Hi Michael,
I've made some progress with local seeks - when you seek from within mv_embed (vs. from MetavidWiki) it doesn't stop/replay. I've now also made the VLC player work with local seeking - but I'm having weird problems with the plugin when you try to seek to the future (I am not sure yet whether it has to do with seeking to the future, or seeking to a point in the file that has not been played yet). I am not also sure whether it has anything to do with my encoding of the (flash) files. For now, I have it fast-forward to do forward seeks (super lame, but it's all I could figure out for now).
Also, I have a question about duration when it is not specified in the URL. For the start offset / ntp (in a media source) it makes sense to set to 0. For the duration / end_ntp I left it undefined, and then had the player fill in the value when it gets it. But, in a lot of cases (I think all I've noticed) the default value used when duration / end_ntp is undefined is simply 0. So, should I just set the duration / end_ntp to 0, and then change it when the player gets the true value? I think it would make a lot of cases simpler. Do you see any problems with this (I'm basically proposing to use 0 as a special value instead of using null as a special value, which seems to be OK since no video should have a true duration of 0)?
Finally - when you click on a transcript item it looks like MetavidWiki issues a updateSrcTime request followed by a play request. This has the desired end effect with the way I have local seeking working, but the bad side-effect of stopping / reloading. Instead, could we have MetavidWiki just call a single mv_embed function that would do the appropriate thing depending on whether we are local seeking or url seeking? (something like playByTimeReq?).
Stjepan