The right to Pause media indefinitely and be able to resume where I left off.
suggested by Dan T.2013-10-08
Dan T.: Not everyone has time to go all the way through some long piece of media (video, audio... even a text file!) in one session. It's nice if there's some way to hold your place until next time you return to it. Ancient media tend to be better at this than "modern, hi-tech" ones. A good old-fashioned paper book lets you insert a bookmark. An audio or video cassette will keep its place until you rewind it. Newer media tend to be worse at that. Embedded web audio/video has a tendency to reset, abort, time-out, or otherwise lose its place if you pause it and leave it open in a browser tab for extended periods. Even text articles left open in a browser will sometimes lose their place in "Ajaxy" sites full of gimmicky scripts, auto-refreshing, and the like. And don't get me started on BluRay disks, which manage to step backwards from the slightly-older DVD medium by using "sophisticated" techniques to defeat my DVD player's usual behavior of remembering its place in the current disc even if I power it down and resuming when I turn it back on; BluRays are a crapshoot where some of them will resume, some will ask me if I want to resume, and still others will just start over with the annoying ads. I wish all media gave me the chance to save my place and resume. (Netflix Streaming is actually pretty good in this regard, holding my place in multiple videos / video series.)
Flick Harrison: I also hate the way buffering has regressed recently. This makes it difficult to use media in the superior old way - if I want to re-watch a moment I just saw, I click earlier in the stream, and now it ALWAYS starts loading again from the spot I clicked, instead of re-playing the same file I already downloaded.
Perhaps it's to do with i-frames and interpolation etc but that's not my problem as a user... ;-)
Cueing media is indeed important for teaching. Students get very distracted watching me fast-forward.
Dan T.: Not everyone has time to go all the way through some long piece of media (video, audio... even a text file!) in one session. It's nice if there's some way to hold your place until next time you return to it. Ancient media tend to be better at this than "modern, hi-tech" ones. A good old-fashioned paper book lets you insert a bookmark. An audio or video cassette will keep its place until you rewind it. Newer media tend to be worse at that. Embedded web audio/video has a tendency to reset, abort, time-out, or otherwise lose its place if you pause it and leave it open in a browser tab for extended periods. Even text articles left open in a browser will sometimes lose their place in "Ajaxy" sites full of gimmicky scripts, auto-refreshing, and the like. And don't get me started on BluRay disks, which manage to step backwards from the slightly-older DVD medium by using "sophisticated" techniques to defeat my DVD player's usual behavior of remembering its place in the current disc even if I power it down and resuming when I turn it back on; BluRays are a crapshoot where some of them will resume, some will ask me if I want to resume, and still others will just start over with the annoying ads. I wish all media gave me the chance to save my place and resume. (Netflix Streaming is actually pretty good in this regard, holding my place in multiple videos / video series.)
Flick Harrison: I also hate the way buffering has regressed recently. This makes it difficult to use media in the superior old way - if I want to re-watch a moment I just saw, I click earlier in the stream, and now it ALWAYS starts loading again from the spot I clicked, instead of re-playing the same file I already downloaded. Perhaps it's to do with i-frames and interpolation etc but that's not my problem as a user... ;-) Cueing media is indeed important for teaching. Students get very distracted watching me fast-forward.