Abstract
The Web is a natural platform for multimedia, with universal reach, powerful backend services, and a rich selection of components for capture, interactivity, and presentation. In addition, with a strong commitment to modularity, composition, and interoperability, the Web should allow advanced media experiences to be constructed by harnessing the combined power of simpler components. Unfortunately, with timed media this may be complicated, as media components require synchronization to provide a consistent experience. This is particularly the case for distributed media experiences. In this chapter we focus on temporal interoperability on the Web, how to allow heterogeneous media components to operate consistently together, synchronized to a common timeline and subject to shared media control. A programming model based on external timing is presented, enabling modularity, interoperability, and precise timing among media components, in single-device as well as multi-device media experiences. The model has been proposed within the W3C Multi-device Timing Community Group as a new standard, and this could establish temporal interoperability as one of the foundations of the Web platform.
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Notes
- 1.
Motion as in motion pictures. Moving through media still remains a good way to conceptualize media experiences, not least as media experiences become virtual and immersive.
- 2.
Media component: anything from a simple DOM element with text, to a highly sophisticated media player or multimedia framework.
- 3.
Mediated by timing objects.
- 4.
In this chapter, the Web is seen through the eyes of an end user browsing the Web with his/her favorite user agent in 2017.
- 5.
There may be more than one event loop, more than one queue of tasks per event loop, and event loops also have a micro-task queue that helps prioritizing some of the tasks added by HTML algorithms, but this does not change the gist of the comments contained in this section.
- 6.
In the future, it may be possible to re-create a seekable stream out of a MediaStream, thanks to the MediaRecorder interface defined in the MediaStream Recording specification [25]. This specification is not yet stable when this book is written.
- 7.
Some animation frameworks support acceleration. Acceleration broadens the utility of motions, yet will likely be ignored in common use cases in classical media (see Sect. 17.7.2).
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Arntzen, I.M., Borch, N.T., Daoust, F. (2018). Media Synchronization on the Web. In: Montagud, M., Cesar, P., Boronat, F., Jansen, J. (eds) MediaSync. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65840-7_17
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