Optional custom start/seek to time when sharing video, audio and (supported) embedded content

M

marquisite

Well-known member
This is kind of a niche feature... I'd personally like to see a way to link to a specific time within XFMG video or audio content (locally-hosted or embedded types).

On my site there are a number of long YouTube videos in XFMG that have clickable timestamp links provided by the uploader if you watch them directly on YouTube but this information is not presently available if watching the same video in XFMG. I can see that this same functionality could be useful for comments that refer to a particular part of a video.

YouTube.com automatically converts timestamps in video comments to clickable links, e.g. 0:15, 18:20 etc. Could a similar approach be taken with XFMG 2? Time links inside XFMG comments could automatically be converted into a clickable link that would run javascript to seek the visible video/audio player to that particular time. The YouTube Player API has a seekTo function: https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference?csw=1#seekTo. It appears that the YouTube iframe code would need to append enablejsapi=1 to the end of the iframe src attribute.

Or perhaps a more flexible way would be to implement seek-on-load with a link that could be inserted into any post and on external sites e.g. path/to/xenforo/media/title.1?seek=55 for 55 seconds. Perhaps XFMG 2 could make use of the XF2 media embed code improvements for the sites that support custom start times? See https://xf2demo.xenforo.com/threads/twitter-as-an-embeddable-media-type.380/page-2#post-17118 https://xf2demo.xenforo.com/threads/twitter-as-an-embeddable-media-type.380/post-17176

I understand if this feature isn't viable, that's fine. I'll just continue as now and insert non-clickable time links within the first XFMG comment for a particular media item :)
 
Upvote 0
This is generally a valid suggestion for start times within uploaded media (videos and albums) but start times with YouTube and other media sites is already implemented -- XFMG basically just uses the BB code media site system hence XFMG now supports nearly 20 different media sites and any features.

In the case of YouTube, if the URL provided when adding media contains the timestamp then that will be the starting time of the video.

https://xenforo.com/community/media...-enthusiasm-season-9-trailer-2-2017-hbo.1882/

I appreciate you might want more control over this such as comment links or the ability to control it from the media URL but that likely isn't something we'll aim to support.
 
Thanks for the information, this does sound good. But I would like even more if a URL-based start time could take priority over any specified at the time the media was submitted to XFMG (such as with a "?seek=#" URL parameter.) :D

There are times when quoting only part of a forum post is appropriate and XenForo supports that nicely with the highlight to quote feature. Similarly someone may want to refer and link to a specific part of an XFMG video or audio in their post (or on an external site). If this were possible it would be awesome, e.g. play from 29 seconds with this URL: https://xenforo.com/community/media...asm-season-9-trailer-2-2017-hbo.1882/?seek=29 :)
 
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