I have some h.264 mv4 videos with chapters and I want to be able to skip and/or display chapters? I will buy a plug in if hecessary, but I really want my video chapters to show up.
Is there no way to display M4v chapters within Rapidweaver? I used to do this years ago with Quicktime. Can anyone help?
M4V (basically an MP4 file) will get handled by web browsers as a single video file. I believe that Quicktime previously used proprietary meta data encoded into video files, to handle chapters and display a DVD-style menu or split a progress bar into multiple segments. That won’t work on the web.
The Player stack (disclosure: I am the developer) supports captions and subtitles fed into a video file using separate VTT files. Possibly (and this is untested) you could leverage the same feature to insert your chapter marks against your video.
I don’t know how those chapter marks will get displayed. I would think you’d have to disable custom controls and use default browser controls, in the Player stack settings. From what I see, chapter marks get rendered as dots in the native web browser video scrub bar.
This example proves that chapters in HTML5 video presented online is possible:
http://www.html5videoguide.net/demos/google_io/3_navigation/
If you go into the source code for that example webpage, you can see how their VTT file is written:
http://www.html5videoguide.net/demos/google_io/3_navigation/webvtt_talk_captions.vtt
You could try something similar with the Player stack. I provide a free demo version of the stack for you to download and try.
To replicate something whereby you have a list of chapters (and a person can click and jump to a specific chapter) would most likely require a custom stack or pitched as an idea for a new stack. It requires quite complex Javascript and to my knowledge nothing like that exists for RapidWeaver currently.
Actually on closer inspection of the source code in the above example, it appears they have 2 VTT files in use. One handles the on-screen subtitles (the same as what we do in the Player stack) and a second sets the chapter marks:
http://www.html5videoguide.net/demos/google_io/3_navigation/webvtt_talk_navigation.vtt
They are then using Javascript to dynamically read the chapter marks VTT file and generate the menu you see on the right.