Ian Hickson has added to the HTML draft standard a specification for timed tracks.
This provides a simple, standardised way to add timed auxiliary content to video.
This spec has huge potential: timed cues for arbitrary content synchronised with media playback – as well as simpler subtitle/caption/description use cases. Once again the web becomes less static and – maybe – more like a broadcast medium.
A video with tracks might look like this:
<video src="foo.ogv"><track kind="captions" src="fooCaptions.srt" srclang="en"></track><track kind="descriptions" src="fooDesciptions.srt" srclang="en"></track><track kind="chapters" src="fooChapters.srt" srclang="en"></track><track kind="subtitles" src="fooSubtitles_de.srt" srclang="de"></track><track kind="subtitles" src="fooSubtitles_en.srt" srclang="en"></track><track kind="subtitles" src="fooSubtitles_ja.srt" srclang="ja"></track><track kind="subtitles" src="fooSubtitles_oz.srt" srclang="oz"></track><track kind="metadata" src="keyStage3.srt" srclang="en" label="Key Stage 3"></track><track kind="metadata" src="keyStage4.srt" srclang="en" label="Key Stage 4"></track><track kind="metadata" src="keyStage5.srt" srclang="en" label="Key Stage 5"></track></video>
Tracks use the WebSRT data format which — for cue in a kind = “metadata” track — might look like this:
10:00.000 --> 20:00.000
{title:"Fish", moreinfo:"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish", image:"images/fish.jpg"}
The spec also defines CSS extensions, like this:
::cue { color: green; font: 1em sans-serif; }
::cue-part(1) { font: bold 1em serif; }
Documentation
The track element:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#the-track-element
WebSRT:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/websrt.html
Timed track formats:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Timed_track_formats
Timed track use cases:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Timed_tracks
