Re: Tech Discussions on the Multitrack Media (issue-152)

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 5:36 AM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
>> Hi Philip,
>>
>> Just a quick note that the "alternative" vs "additional" distinction is not always completely clear. Video with different camera angles (gimmiky or not) could be considered as an alternative, or could be rendered as picture-in-picture, or multiple thumbnail videos could show beside the main video (some sports sites already do this kind of thing).
>>
>> If you have the output capabilities (e.g. wireless headphones plus regular speakers) then simultaneous output of different audio languages might make sense.
>>
>> Not to say these are compelling use-cases, just that the markup should indicate what the media actually is such that the player can decide what to do, without any hard "alternative" vs "additional" distinction.
>
> I think I generally agree.

Is there anything that prevents an implementation from displaying
multiple "alternative" streams at the same time? Even if they are
explicitly labelled and in spec called "alternative" I wouldn't think
there is. Compare to how there are currently alternative CSS
stylesheets. There is nothing preventing an implementation from
displaying multiple windows which have different alternative
stylesheets applied, as long as the DOM acts as though a specific one
is applied (you can only return one value for .offsetTop). This is a
model that works quite well IMHO since it doesn't require page authors
to keep more exotic UAs in mind, allowing UAs to freely experiment.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2011 01:09:09 UTC