Just as Tim noted Google Video is making it so we can pick an arbitrary start point to play a video clip, now you can do the same with audio clips on Odeo:
Someone send me an email asking how to link to a specific part of a podcast in Odeo, which is a little-known feature we haven’t exposed much yet. But if you, for example, want to point to the part of Diggnation Episode #0055 where Kevin and Alex, um, dig on Calacanis for his offer to pay top Digg users to use Netscape, you would just make a link like so:
http://odeo.com/audio/1556127/play/quote/8:05/11:30
The first time in there is the start time, and the second (optional) is the end time.
Update Note: This sort of how it works- see comment below, it may not be just extracting the shorter clip, but fetching the whole stream and making the viewer wait while the player buffers to the start point (total guess work)
This is getting closer to what Jon Udell posted many many blogs ago— breaking up big media chunks into smaller addressable bits. It’s happening, and opens all kinds of future doors for ripping and mixing, but most of all, takes media like audio and video and frees them from being monolithic entities.
A tip of the CogDogBlog hat to my old Shockwave colleague JD– just wish he’d return messages, but he is a bit of an e-mail recluse 😉
Hi Alan, looks great, but I can’t seem to make it work. I follow the link and it still loads at the beginning of the podcast. Any idea what I am doing wrong?
Thanks,
tim
Yikes, this was one of the things I posted w/o even trying first (lame excuse, heavy rain was affecting my satellite net connection….)
But I just tried it this morning, and here is what happened:
* Odeo loads with a progress bar that is about 1/3 the way out in the audio, looking about where out of a 38 minute clip, 8:05 would start (but the counter on the right, black is at 0:00
* I clicked play, and it spent about 40-70 seconds “buffering” and then started playing at the 8:05 mark.
So my guess is the way it works is it still must fetch the entire audio, and must buffer its way through the media to hit the right start point. It is now really just fetching the clip I asked for, just a shorthand for doing, “Get the whole audio, but start playing it 1/3 the way in…”
Thanks for actually testing it! Would be worth a comment to the Evhead blog…
This is really nice. I wonder if there are any plans to agree on a single form of the URL?
This is again a great example of how things work out in the web, where standards are rough consensus and working code.
Good stuff … if we can get podzinger-like indexing in odeo then it would be really fun