Re: metadata in the VTT file header, re-starting the conversation

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 5:31 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:31:42 +0100, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> this conversation petered out, and we could really do with a way to store
>> attributes in the VTT file header:
>> a) documented (standard)
>> b) vendor-specific and experimental, probably
>>
>> Does anyone have any preferred syntax for doing this?  It's a little
>> tricky, because one of the values I'd like to support is in-line CSS
>
>
> In my private and humble opinion, a standardized format for metadata in
> WebVTT overkill and not really something we need for v1. I'd prefer to
> simply have some form of comment block that people can experiment with
> before trying to go further.

The need for this metadata is not with browsers, who can already get
all the required information from the HTML <track> element. Desktop
players are in an entirely different situation and lack that
information. We need to provide a means to deliver that information to
desktop players and indeed other desktop applications. Putting it
outside of the WebVTT file is impractical. If we leave the format in
which this data is given open for experimentation, we will get files
in all sorts of formats that won't be able to be parsed by typical
applications. One such application is indeed the parsing of WebVTT
files and encapsulation into media files such as WebM and MPEG. There
is already a spec for parsing such metadata and putting it into WebM
files right now. We don't want there to be a different and competing
one for MPEG.

In fact, this needs to be resolved soon so the WebM and MPEG
encapsulation specs can go forward.

Regards,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 21:14:42 UTC