Media & Entertainment IG conference call on 360-degree video

Hi all,

The Media & Entertainment Interest Group had a conference call last Thursday discussing 360-degree video support on the web. The goal was to start a discussion to identify any gaps in the web platform APIs needed to better support 360-degree video.

Stefan Pham from Fraunhofer Fokus presented their 360-degree video playout system [1], which has identified some issues with Media Source Extensions:

- The need for a low latency buffering capability
- Reliability of replacing segments using the 'segment' AppendMode in a single SourceBuffer
- Switching between multiple SourceBuffers attached to a single MediaSource

He also mentioned that using WebGL and Canvas for video transformations is not possible with protected content, and so a secure media path is needed.

Nell Waliczek from Microsoft presented the current state of work in the WebVR CG, which has been renamed to the Immersive Web CG. This is the place to continue discussion of 360-degree video support. Nell will send information to the IG on how to contribute to the Immersive Web CG. Topics that are specific to WebXR should be followed up there, e.g., support for protected content.

We briefly discussed metadata, in particular projection information, and David Dorwin from Google pointed out their existing work [2]. See related work on OMAF at MPEG [3]. There seemed to be consensus to favour a metadata based solution. David also mentioned the need for extensibility to support different projections.

More general topics, not specific to WebXR, e.g., the MSE related issues mentioned should be handled separately. David Dorwin will report back on the current status of discussion on updating Media Source Extensions at WICG, and I recommend that Stephan follows up with the MSE related issues they have found.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out some relevant work that BBC R&D had done regarding the challenges of designing subtitle behaviours for 360-degree video content [4, 5].

Minutes from the meeting are available at [6].

I look forward to continuing to collaborate on this topic.

Kind regards,

Chris (Co-chair, W3C Media & Entertainment Interest Group)

[1] https://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/images/f/fb/2018-01-04-Fraunhofer-FOKUS-360-for-W3C-M%26E.pdf
[2] https://github.com/google/spatial-media/blob/master/docs/spherical-video-v2-rfc.md
[3] https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-a/omnidirectional-media-application-format
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-03-subtitles-360-video-virtual-reality
[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-10-subtitles-360-video-virtual-reality-vr
[6] https://www.w3.org/2018/01/04-me-minutes.html

Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2018 14:19:20 UTC