[RNLD] Links between publication and sound corpus

[John Hatton]

> That was some time ago and now I think I would use an archival version of the media as the streaming source and have HTML5 calls to the timecodes. 

 

Am I understanding the problem correctly?

 

1) We want URLs which act just like a pointer to a static wav somewhere on the internet. These can then be embedded in anything.

2) But because we don't want to actually carve up each file into little files, we need the URL to specify a time range rather than just a filename.

3) We want to point to an archived version, not some special vers

 

ion hosted for the purpose of these embedded links.

 

If I understand the problem, then the solution is a URL like

 

http://<some snippet service>.org/<address of the archived version>?start=<starttime>&end=<endtime>

 

(That last bit after the '?' is called a URL Query string.)

 

E.g.

http://snippetServer. org/?url=paradisec.org.au/someinternalpathat paradisec/KovaiCanoeStory.wav?start=02:20:10 <http://snippetServer.%20org/?url=paradisec.org.au/someinternalpathat%20paradisec/KovaiCanoeStory.wav?start=02:20:10&end=02:22:10> &end=02:22:10

 

When it receives this query, the server would get ahold of the full audio file declared in the query string, and then stream out just the section that was called for. The experience to the user would be the same as if they had clicked on a url of a pre-prepared, stand-alone file containing just that snippet.

 

Now, because the audio itself is served by an archive, it will have a long lifetime. The snippet server itself need not be related to the archive; a single instance could serve everyone. But if the snippet server itself goes away in the future, the URL is still human readable, and can be changed via search/replace to some new snippet server. 

 

To avoid the links going bad, it seems the snippet server should be run by something prepared to be around for a long time, like an MPI or an 

 

archive itself:

 

http://paradisec.org.au/snippetserver/...

 

Practically, such a server could limit its services to files in its own repository or some set of other domains, if it didn’t want to end up providing this snippet service for just any content on the web.

 

I googled a bit, didn't come up with anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if such a service already existed. If not, well clearly this would be cheap to do.

 

John Hatton

SIL International Language Software Develoment

 

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