[download] Recording and Downloading Media

Web & TV Interest Group,
Recording and Downloading Media Task Force,
 
Greetings.  On the topics of recording and downloading media on the Web, new protocols can be devised, utilizing URI syntax (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986) featurefully, interoperably with media fragments URI (http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/), interoperably with HTML5 (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/), and interoperably with HTML5 video.
 
For example, a segmented downloading protocol, torrent, can utilize a URI scheme (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.1), "torrent+http", with a MIME type of multipart/mixed (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-5.1.3), multipart/parallel (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1521#section-7.2.5), or another multipart MIME type, and can be utilized in HTML5 documents (https://groups.google.com/a/bittorrent.com/forum/#!topic/bt-developers/Uhyg0OX2Ifo, https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/aRBBvVNKVew, https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/metalink-discussion/t-S3U2A65QQ).  A .torrent file can be downloaded utilizing one protocol and then utilized by another protocol.  The URI scheme string could be "http+torrent" instead and there could be other combinations of protocols, for example FTP with "torrent+ftp" or "ftp+torrent".
 
Interestingly, HTTP can redirect across protocols, with HTTP status codes such as 300, and, in an example scenario:
 
https://www.archive.org/multimedia/file.avi

could be redirected to:
 
torrent+https://www.archive.org/multimedia/file.torrent#file=file.avi

Client HTTP headers can indicate whether the .torrent content type is understood by UA's though that need not be a requisite for servers to indicate redirection options to .torrent files, possibly utilizing a protocol as described. Various features which can be observed in projects like Metalink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink) are possible in XML-based or hypertext document formats.

On the topic of digital textbooks, on the topic of included materials or linked to materials, many organizations, including the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/teachers/tps/), advocate teaching with primary sources.  For that scenario, with linked to materials, and for various other scenarios, archives, museums, and libraries could utilize segmented downloading technologies.  Multimedia archives (http://www.loc.gov/film/arch.html) such as the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/) could utilize such technologies.
 
Multimedia repositories could experience peaks in video or clip usage as a result of hyperlinks in Web documents and articles and, with regard to content linked to from digital textbooks, we can expect periodic peaks in usage annually, per semester or per quarter.  Segmented downloading scales to all of those scenarios.

With regard to recording video, some technical topics include recording interactive video with users' expectation that recorded clips of interactive video would be interactive.

An HTML5 WG topic might pertain to the saving of websites to disk for offline use, and how multimedia elements are saved to disk.

Another recording-related topic pertains to the use of recorded clips, where fair use scenarios include "commentary, search engines, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use).  Beyond the use of hyperlinks, hypertext quotes and multimedia clips can be utilized in fair use scenarios in blogging contexts and HTML5-based scholarly and scientific publications.  Users might want to be able to obtain a media fragment link from a selection of content or to record a selection or clip of fresh or archived content to make fair use of.  Commentary about television shows, including archived television shows is fair use.  Various formats to reference materials in publications, e.g. MLA, could be extended for video clips and selections, in the ways that authors can utilize quotes from text-based materials while indicating specific pages.
 
On the topic of searching multimedia, users are expected to soon be able to search into multimedia content and to be able to find content utilizing processed audio, transcripts, tracks, and/or metadata.  Multimedia search is an exciting topic and is expected to facilitate and enhance the rapidity of content discovery and of multimedia-based research.  Multimedia search technologies include MAVIS (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mavis/) and PHAROS (http://www.pharos-audiovisual-search.eu/).  Search results from multimedia search technologies could utilize media fragments URI to describe clips of multimedia containing searched for content.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski