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