Thursday 25 August 2011

New media element APIs and better media seeking resolution

French intern Paul Adenot has recently implemented the seekable and played attributes on the HTML5 video and audio elements in Firefox. The seekable attribute enables script to see what regions of the media can be seeked into (particularly handy with live streams), and the played attribute enables script to see what regions of the media has already been played. Paul has also done some work improving the built in controls on media elements. Thanks for your hard work Paul! These should be available in release builds in November (Firefox 8).

Also in Firefox 8 are my changes to media seeking resolution. Now media seeking should be accurate to the nearest microsecond. It's been reported elsewhere how important accurate seeking for video is. We were previously accurate to the nearest video frame, but we could still be up to one audio packet off (often between 4 and 8 ms out). Now we prune audio samples when seeking so we're down to microsecond resolution.

2 comments:

Gregory Maxwell said...

I'm a bit confused by the BBC post. When was firefox's seeking not at least frame accurate?

Chris Pearce said...

There were a few bugs which caused our seeking implementation to sometimes be a few frames off. Matthew Gregan outlined them and fixed them in Mozilla bug 626273.