Re: Feedback on MediaController

On Apr 25, 2011, at 7:16 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Apr 25, 2011, at 6:04 PM, David Singer wrote:
>> 
>>> I am not sure about the terminology of name, kind, label, type, etc.
>>> 
>>> As far as I can see, we have
>>> 
>>> * the media type: video, audio, text, metadata (undisplayed temporal data), maybe one or two others
>>> * the container type: MP4, WebM, etc.
>>> * the coding type: VP8, H.264, Vorbis, etc.
>>> * the function, purpose, role, etc. (currently called 'kind'): main, sign-language, dubbed, alternate, supplementary, commentary,
>>> * label: some kind of user-displayable label for the track, maybe, but this gets into internationalization issues (in how many languages do I supply the label string?)
>>> 
>>> MIME covers the first two, and with a codecs parameter, the first three.  I absolutely need the 4th (role) in order to match up what a user wants with what's being offered.  The 5th, I am not sure...
>> 
>> I understood "label" to be a fall-back for the case where the "kind" is not recognized. If you don't recognize the kind you can't apply user preferences or attach the track to an appropriate UI element, but at least you could provide a menu of the labels, which would each be in the language of the track they label.
> 
> Label is not a fallback for kind. The label is a string that will be
> used to create the text in menus of available tracks to provide users
> with the possibility to turn tracks on/off interactively. It would be
> provided in the language of the Web page and thus be part of any i18n
> that the Web page authors do anyway. "Kind" in contrast is for scripts
> and is not user exposed.

What I meant is that if the script recognizes the "kind" it may be able to do sensible things with the track, such as apply user preferences or include it in an appropriate menu in the page UI (audio descriptions in the audio descriptions menu, language dubs in the language dub menu etc.).

If you don't recognize the "kind" the best you can do is put all the (unrecognized) tracks into a single menu, using the label to disambiguate them to the user.

In case there's confusion, I am talking about a model where controls, menus and user preferences are implemented by the scripts on the page. Obviously some of these features may also be provided by the UA itself.

...Mark



> 
> Silvia.
>

Received on Tuesday, 26 April 2011 02:23:23 UTC