We've been looking in detail at the relationship of play/pause to
playback rate, and have a suggestion to simplify the design and make
it easier both to implement and understand (we hope).
- - - - - - - - - - -
About playbackRate and defaultPlaybackRate in the current
specification of media elements, the logic that's currently necessary
to set a media element to play at rate n is somewhat convoluted:
If the media is paused
1) Set the defaultPlaybackRate to n.
2) Issue play().
If the media is not paused
- Set the playbackRate to n.
And there's a distinct lack of permanence to setting playbackRate on
playing media to alter its rate. Once media is paused, the play()
method will reset the rate of the media (and playbackRate itself) to
defaultPlaybackRate instead of to the previous value of playbackRate,
which we think is unexpected.
Similarly, the logic required to determine the rate at which media is
playing or is about to play is convoluted. When listening for
ratechange events, scripts must perform different checks depending on
whether the media is currently playing.
Proposal:
Eliminate defaultPlaybackRate and instead define "the rate at which
the media is authored" to be represented by the numerical value of
1.0.
The playbackRate is the rate at which the media plays when not
paused. The initial value of playbackRate is set to 1.0 (or perhaps
initialized from the media, if it has the ability to indicate an
initial suggested rate). Setting playbackRate to 0 throws a
NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR exception. Setting playbackRate while the media is
playing changes the current playback rate. Setting the playbackRate
when the movie is paused does not start playback.
The play() method to cause the media to play at the rate stored in
playbackRate.
The pause() method pauses media playback but does not affect
playbackRate. It sets the paused attribute to true. pause() when
paused does nothing.
We think this provides sufficient control and makes the task of
scripting a custom controller a good deal simpler.
--
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime
