Hyperlinking to the "good stuff" in an embedded web video
People who embed videos on the web frequently tell their readers to fast forward to a specific point to get to the "good stuff", for example here.
It’s dumb that readers have to do that manually. If Flash video players were slightly smarter, the author could create an easy-to-type hyperlink that would cause the embedded video to skip to a specific section of the video and start playing.
For example, an embedded player could note that you had navigated to the anchor "#youtube-6-30" and automatically skip to a point 6 minutes and 30 seconds into the video.
Power users ought to be able to create their own "virtual edit" of a video by specifying a sequence of time segments to play back. A blogger might create their selection of highlights from the presidential debate to accompany their post, for example, without having to actually re-encode the video.
I can also imagine authoring tools on sites like YouTube that would make it easy to create your own virtual edit.
Even with such tools, however, I think it’s valuable to have a simple, typeable convention for hyperlinking into the midde of a video as described earlier.
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I’d like to see heat maps in the slider to indicate which segment(s) of the video get watched over and over, and which parts get skipped. Maybe add a “jump to hotspot(s)” button to make it dead easy to skip to the money shot. Put the teeming millions to work!
By Jon Witort on 01.25.08 11:10 am
A good idea that is already possible, Phil. Yes it would be nice if Adobe propogated an accepted-upon convention for cuing via URLs. However, the lovely part about Flash is that it is richly programmable. Flash FLV supports the concept of embedded cue points. Flash SWFs can talk to URLs by any of a number of mechanisms. So if you want to build abstracted Flash player that reads querystring data or cookie data or any other kind of “external” data and acts on it, that can be done fairly easily.
You are limited a bit by the fact that 99% of YouTube-type videos is progressively loaded vs. truly streamed, but within the simple scenarios you’re describing it should work fine.
I’ve done things similar to this for the University of Washington: Flash templates that are effectively parameterized and whose behavior and content can be specified “outside” the swf: in HTML, or talking through Javascript/AJAX.
-KF
By Ken Fine (nee Bogle) on 01.25.08 4:42 pm
The problem with embedded cue points is that they have to embedded by the author. It should be possible for *anyone* to link to an arbitary segment in the video.
By philbo on 01.26.08 2:59 pm
It sounds like you can dynamically define cue points in actionscript. So it might be possible to build an actionscript wrapper around a flash video player that observes the URL anchor changes and dynamically sets a cue point to the appropriate point.
http://studio.brightcove.com/library/howto/cuepoints-basics/
By philbo on 01.26.08 7:44 pm
Correct. I have built such “actionscript wrappers” that accept arbitrary parameters from dumb inputs like cookies or URLs. Communicating with a Flash wrapper –>SWF via javascripts or sockets or whatever can also be done reliably. Actionscript is very open.
If you have a project in mind, and $ or equity to blow, feel free to drop a line.
Essie and I tried to call Millie and KR this morning, no dice, left a message. You should have the wee ones give us a ring Tues. evening, which is the next time Essie will reliably be home (she has call tomorrow.) We have renewed our annual passes to Disneyland and are expecting you to do your duty as true-blue Americans.
-KF
By Ken Fine (Nee Bogle) on 01.28.08 2:41 am
KF.
Is it possible to cue a video hyperlink in a .swf file that has been exported as a .mov? or .wmv?
By CNovak on 03.18.08 5:01 pm
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