This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 23 Oct 2007, by Wisely.
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23 Oct 07
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Media RSS (specification, FAQ). Media RSS is a Yahoo!-sponsored RSS 2.0 module that's intended to complement the <enclosure> tag, supplying metadata—about the media file itself, its classifications, and its creators—that will make the content easier to discover.
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I blogged this 75-second clip from David Bornstein's Pop!Tech lecture posted on ITConversations. Given a start time of 23:43 and an end time of 24:58, it's easy enough to form this URL:
http://www.itconversations.com/clip.php?showid=251&start=23:43&stop=24:58
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Doug Kaye provides a helper to make it even easier. But snagging the ins and outs from your media player in order to create that clip isn't always a walk in the park.
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Because Winamp uses the HTTP 1.1 Range mechanism I mentioned in MP3 Sound Bites, you can start jumping around in a web-based file immediately, without waiting for the whole thing to load. And using CTRL-J, you can jump to precise minute:second offsets. Added to this goodness is the fact that the left and right arrow keys jump forward and backward in small increments.
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Like Winamp, RealPlayer allows random access into a web-based MP3 file and enables you to jump (Real calls it seek) to exact minute:second offsets. You can also move forward and backward in one-second increments using CTRL plus the left/right arrow keys.
In version 10, we see the beginning of a segment-editing sensibility. When you add a clip to your Favorites, you have the option to set a start time (though not a corresponding end time or duration). On Windows, for the clip mentioned above, the result is this shortcut:
"C:\Program Files\Real\RealPlayer\realplay.exe" /startpos:00:23:45 \ http://rdscon.vo.llnwd.net/o1/_downloads/itc/mp3/2004/ David%20Bornstein%20-%20New%20Solutions.mp3
I'm puzzled, though, as to why the shortcut couldn't be this instead:
"C:\Program Files\Real\RealPlayer\realplay.exe" \ http://rdscon.vo.llnwd.net/o1/_downloads/itc/mp3/2004/ David%20Bornstein%20-%20New%20Solutions.mp3?\start=23:43&end=24:58
or, alternatively, a reference to a .RAM encapsulation of that URL by way of a ramgen service. It seems to me that if Real Networks hosted a well-known instance of that service, it could accumulate an interesting library of media fragments.
Something else puzzles me here. If you construct this URL and load it, you'll find that RealPlayer's 23:43 isn't quite the same as Winamp's, or ITConversations', or my own clipping service's, or Audacity's. In RealPlayer, the sentence that begins like so, "Historically when we think of how social change happens," appears not at 23:43, but at 23:50. I've yet to get to the bottom of this discrepancy, which amounts to a whopping seven seconds in this example, but it's clearly problematic. QuickTime, by the way, exhibits the same behavior as RealPlayer.
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Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player doesn't support HTTP 1.1 random access, so you can only hunt for ins and outs within the portion of an MP3 file that's already loaded. You can move forward and backward using the arrow keys but not precisely: WMP seems to divide this function into 20 increments no matter what the length of the file. And there's no jump-to/seek-to feature.
WMP does, however, take a stab at providing UI for extracting a segment. Its Media Link for E-Mail feature offers these controls: Mark In, Mark Out, and Send media link in e-mail. The lack of precise selection control makes it hard to establish the right ins and outs. There's no way to review or adjust the segment you've selected. And the resulting description is only accessible by way of e-mail. But the e-mail does include this interesting XML attachment:
<Asx Version = "3.0" > <Param Name = "AllowShuffle" Value = "yes" /> <Entry> <Param Name = "SourceURL" Value = "http://rdscon.vo.llnwd.net/o1/_downloads/itc/mp3/2004/ David%20Bornstein%20-%20New%20Solutions.mp3"/> <StartTime value = "00:23:43" /> <Duration value = "00:01:15" /> <Title > David Bornstein - New Solutions</Title> <Ref href = "http://rdscon.vo.llnwd.net"/> </Entry> </Asx>
This is an ASX file. The complete set of ASX elements is documented here.
When I opened the ASX attachment I'd sent myself it did play the referenced segment but only after loading half the 20MB file; as already mentioned, this is because WMP doesn't do HTTP 1.1 random access with MP3s.
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- HTTP 1.1 random access
- Seek/jump to offset
- Precise cursor control
- Selection marking and review, with precise adjustment of segment boundaries
- Export in/out times
In the final analysis, no single player has all these features:
If we want the natural contextualizing forces of the Web to work on media files, we'll need to establish this feature set as a de facto standard. And we'll need UI conventions that make the selection of time-based content as universal an idiom, across platforms and applications, as the selection of text already is.
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