blog.humaneguitarist.org

XSPF: a simple XML media playlist

[Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:54:31 +0000]
Just a short post on the XSPF [http://www.xspf.org/] playlist format. I'm not going to get into how to use it, but I do want to share a demo of how it could be used to lets users more easily navigate an audio rendering of a poem or transcript, etc. using the JW Player [http://www.longtailvideo.com/]. The demo uses XSPF to allow a user to jump to the first 3 stanzas of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere as read by Bridget Rafferty for LibriVox [http://librivox.org/long-poems-collection-006/]. Just use the fast forward button to jump to the next stanza. Conversely, if the stanzas were segmented into multiple MP3s, etc. then the playlist could be used in the opposite manner. That's to say that the playlist could be used to play the various segments back as a single continuity so the user doesn't have to manually start the playback of each stanza/MP3. Here's the XSPF playlist [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/JW_player/playlist.xml] if you'd like to see it. Here's the demo [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/JW_player/xspf.html].