On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:56 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman < d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com> wrote:
As part of Brion's and mine struggle for better A/V support on Wikipedia, I have concluded that our current support for subtitles is rather... improvised.
Currently all our SRT files are referenced from HTML using action=raw. But then not actually used from action=raw, but instead served up as semi html using api.php. Which is ridiculous... If we want to move to more HTML5 compliancy, we also will want to switch from the SRT format to the VTT format.
Ideally, I want to host multiple subtitle formats, and dynamically serve/convert them as either SRT or VTT. These can be directly referenced from a <track> element so that we are fully compatible.
The question is now, how to best do this. The endpoint needs to be dynamic, cacheable, allow multiple content types etc.
Ideas suggested have been:
- Api.php
- Restbase
- New endpoint
- ResourceLoader modules
I'm listing the current problems, future requirements and discussing several ideas at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler/TimedTextRework?v... If you have any ideas or remarks, please contribute them !
I propose adding an additional associated namespace (like Talk:), except for subtitles. The namespace will be associated with File pages which represent videos, and it will be coupled to a ContentHandler class representing subtitle content. The ContentHandler class will be a natural place for validation logic and the specification of an alternate editing interface suitable for editing subtitles.