[NTG-context] autostart included video

[Hans Hagen]

On 11/19/2020 8:12 AM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

> I use \externalfigure[filename.mp4] to include a video in a presentation. Is it possible to autostart the video automatically when the page is loaded?
Video (and audio) and acrobat ... any browser can play a video but it 
seems too complex for adobes pdf viewers and technology

It all started out simple: there was a video annotation with associated 
controls. It uses the quicktime plugin and when (i guess) apple and 
adobe fell out of love that one was ditched. Goodbye easy media support; 
it worked well and was quite robust too.

In the years following that mechanisms came and went and we got this 
redicoulous complex (split annotation) media subystem that, guess what, 
depended on flash to show something at all. One had to embed some flash 
wrapper. Then adobe fell out of love with flash.

(There was actually a time when SMIL was supported which was quite ok, 
but all my old demos (mediashow.pdf etc) now pop up with missing 
players. At least it was some kind of (probably as usual some reversed 
engineered application xml but I 'm not sure about that).

Now, although I never really needed it. I spent a lot of time on all 
that and end of this year flash will be removed so I'll probably remove 
all that stuff from lmtx too. Goodbye audio and video ... I'd better 
spent my time on reading books, listening music or watching movies.

I really don't understand those policies. Come up with a trivial 
annotation for video and audio, take a few stable formats and keep 
supporting that. How hard is that? Plenty of libraries for that too.

I guess that the next thing to fade away is this 3d subsystem, and after 
that widgets and javascript (some already gone).

So, probably best is some hyperlink to a simple local webpage that pops 
up the video. Don't rely on acrobat (and adobe) for long term support of
anything beyond text. It never pays back to waste time on dynamic 
annotations, widgets etc. It probably never pays back to invest in 
anything those large companies come up with anyway. Don't buy into the 
'there's a large company (or organization) behind it so it is okay and 
will stay'.

(Actually, anything beyond text and graphics rendering in pdf is kind of 
weird. So, let's for instance not try to analyze tagged pdf here.)

I'll probably add some code for url pop ups for media ... makes more 
sense. Delegate to a browser. But maybe it's better to first move the 
fancy annotation stuff to the attic.

Hans


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