Open Subtitles Design Summit – Improving popcorn-js

In my previous post I talked about the Open Subtitles Design Summit. I attended numerous sessions one of which was a discussion on how to improve popcorn-js. For those of you unfamiliar with popcorn you can read my previous blogs related to it (link at the bottom) or look at the demo.  People had many interesting ideas however, the most important is giving people the ability to add their own extensions/metadata kind of like you can get extensions for Firefox. For example is someone has a myspace account that they want to incorporate into the metadata how can they go about doing this. Do they need to rewrite our code and make additions or can they fill in a simple form and have the code generated? The answer to this is still in the discussion phase and I welcome your comments. Another game changing comment was the fact that we are making our own XML format as oppose to using a standard. With so many different media players out there doing the same thing, it is pointless for everyone to be inventing different XML formats. We should all get together and come up with a standard that can be incorporated into the W3C specification. This is a great idea that requires a lot of time and efforts.

Here is a list of the other ideas:

• have an area where images used in the video can be displayed
• sync multiple devices: for people who like to see the content on different devices. For example the video will play on their TV but the twitter will be displayed on their mobile phone at the correct time. (Doable?)
• splitting things into different tracts like a twitter track or a wiki track. This way people can add their own tracks.
• add polls and accept/display answers
• do everything that youTube does
• use webSRT format + custom data to streamline content

For more notes on this session check out the wiki.

View all of my blogs on popcorn-js

View all of my blogs