video-dev
Support for "trick play" thumbnails
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We use hls.js for VOD playback. We would love to add trick-play support within our player using either #EXT-X-I-FRAME-STREAM-INF or #EXT-X-IMAGE-STREAM-INF playlists.
(We render both, I-Frames for Apple and EXT-X-IMAGE-STREAM-INF for Roku)
Describe the solution you'd like
Ideally we would like to be able to display the thumbnails over our seek-bar in a smaller view that hovers over the bar (like Apple does on tvOS).
A less desirable but still acceptable solution would be for a seek to display the I-frames full screen in the video player itself so users can find the spot they are looking for in a video before they stop seeking.
Additional context
No response
I don't plan to add support for Roku's EXT-X-IMAGE-STREAM-INF - that is not part of the HLS spec. I am open to discussing how HLS.js could allow access to these tags and the playlists and segment data they carry.
The plan is to add an I-Frame mode of Hls instances that will deal only with #EXT-X-I-FRAME-STREAM-INF variants and segment data. You would be able to spawn an iframe instance from an instance that has loaded an HLS asset with I-Frame variants and then either attach a new media element for thumbnail preview, or transfer the MediaSource (non-destructive)/detach-attach(destructive) for fullscan FF/RW and scrubbing.
For JPEG thumbs Apple has outlines how to deliver #EXT-X-I-FRAME-STREAM-INF variants with mp4 segments carrying jpeg image data. This is also something that we'll look at for v1.7.
