Quicktime Movie Tracking

November 15, 2006 10:02 AM

How can I get a Quicktime movie to send a String to a server every few seconds while it is playing? Is this even possible?
posted by dminor to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Do you have the luxury of installing software on the client machines? If you do, you can write a custom Quicktime component (perhaps a Text media handler) and invoke it from your movie by adding a track that makes use of that component. Because you are writing the component, you can code it to do whatever you'd like - including sending data back to your server.

On the other hand, if you are only interested in tracking a movie while it is being played in a browser and don't need to send specifically formatted text strings to your server as your movie plays, perhaps you can make use of an HREF track that invokes JavaScript functions as your movie plays. Your JavaScript function can then inform your server as you see fit. Like I mentioned earlier, this won't work if the movie is being played in a context without JavaScript (such as if it were being directly played by the QuickTime Player and not by a browser).
posted by RichardP at 2:17 PM on November 15, 2006

this won't work if the movie is being played in a context without JavaScript

In that case maybe you could use something like SMIL?
posted by ChasFile at 2:21 PM on November 15, 2006

ChasFile, unfortunately SMIL doesn't have a mechanism for providing feedback to a server regarding the playback position. The best you can do divide your movie into numerous small pieces and then infer the playback position based on the loading of media elements from your server. There are several problems with this: (a) some SMIL players don't provide an invisible, glitch-free, transition between elements (b) SMIL players aren't obliged to load elements in any particular temporal order (they are free to load them all before playback or even out of order), and (c) element caching can cause subsequent playbacks to make no requests that can be seen by your server.
posted by RichardP at 3:23 PM on November 15, 2006