URL Anchors in Audio/Video?
This seems like a problem that must have been solved already: How does one create a URL that links to a specific frame/time in an audio or video stream? HTML pages are fine grained; you can link right to a specific word with an anchor. But I can't find a way to make something like this work:
http://www.randomnews.com/2005/09/25/broadcast/audio/seg_04.mp3#00-02-21-03
This supposes something like a "virtual anchor" in the mp3 audio that would let the user navigate to a point 2 minutes 21.03 seconds into the stream. It's not really useful for indexes, search engines and other navigation tools to simply load up a 1 hour podcast or other media blob containing the reference you're looking for, then leave you to your own devices to find the point of interest.
It seems likely that Windows Media Player has execution parameters that allow you to specify the start point in the stream on launch, but my goal is to find a general syntactical solution via URLs to this problem, not a player-specific parameter. Has anyone seen this problem solved with URLs in an elegant way?
Comments
Mike:
Ah I remember this from my VRML days...
Here are a couple of interesting items to check out:
1) URL Embedding into Realtime Video and Audio Streams which is a paper done at a W3C conference in 1996!
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/9610_Workshop/paper00/paper00.html
2) Presentation by Bill Grosky of the Univ of Michigan and his concept of a "Multimedia Semantic Web" from 2002.
http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/SemWebCourse_files/Grosky-Keynote.ppt
Gary.
Posted by: Gary Krall | September 30, 2005 05:31 PM
Jon Udell has don a lot of work in this area, and I think ITConversations uses some of his ideas.
Posted by: Pete Prodoehl | October 7, 2005 02:33 AM
Pete, Gary,
Thanks, will check into your references. 'ppreciate it.
-Mike
Posted by: Michael Graves | October 7, 2005 09:34 PM