entropia

Note: I started writing this a few months ago, and since then TED’s video player has changed. The chapter feature I mention appears to be gone. I tried to find out what happened, but all I could find is a blog post from when the player with chapters was launched.

(There’s another, more popular, term for “netcast”, but I refuse to use it because it is wrong. You can’t just go around calling things by names that they aren’t. Words have meanings. And netcasts are what I’m talking about so “netcasts” are what I’m calling them.)

TED has one of the best Flash video players around. In addition to the usual features - it’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it just works - it has something I haven’t seen anywhere else: chapters. Similar to DVDs, the videos can be split into sections you can jump to, skip over, or replay.

Did a particular section of that video stand out? Watch it again with a click. Is the presenter on a long-winded aside you don’t care about? Skip ahead. Did you get interrupted half-way through the video last time and forget where the presenter left off? Glance at the chapter names for a reminder of what was going on.

I listen to a handful of netcasts, mostly about software development and gaming. Most of them are at least an hour long and some can be more than 3 hours, and I rarely listen to them all the way through without a break. Sometimes I won’t get back to to one for a few days, and it’s easy to forget where I left off. Were they doing “What are you playing?” or “State of the industry” or “News” or “Emails”? Sure, my Zune lets me resume where I stopped listening, but I sometimes have to rewind for a reminder. And sometimes the gaming netcasts talk about games I don’t care about, or spoil games I do care about, that I would like to skip.

Or maybe there’s a radio show or something you only listen to for one good segment in the middle, and you have to skip around to find the beginning every time.

Wouldn’t it be great if your media player showed chapters like the TED player? If it showed you a list of segments when you started playing. If it let you jump between them with the left and right buttons.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just saying, “Hey, let’s add chapters to these audio-thingys and make everyone happier”. First, you need a format that actually supports chapters. As far as I know, none of the popular (MP3) or less popular (WMA, OGG, AAC) formats have anything like this. You might have to use a separate file that contains the chapter information or cram it into an ID3 tag (either of these would be preferable to creating a new format, which would break compatibility with all current players).

Then you need to get the media players to actually use the chapters. If Apple were to add the functionality to iPods through a firmware update, we’d be golden. But unless that happens, widespread support is a long way off.

And finally you need the content creators to start using chapters, which means more work for the producers. Some might be up to the task, but some would resist, because the less time you spend skipping through a netcast looking for what you want, the less time you spend accidentally listening to ads. This is somewhere that the idea of using a separate file or an ID3 tag for the chapter information would be good: third parties could do the chapterizing and make the information available without the need for reencoding the audio.