Consider a boring training video, such as this one on how to brief an instrument approach. At various times in this video, an FAA approach plate appears on screen. It would be nice if, during those periods, parts of the player became active for mouse clicks. Clicking near a fix would bring up the airnav.com page about that fix in a separate window, for example. So there might be three or four buttons hidden in the frame and those buttons would be active only as long as the plate remained on the screen (i.e., 5 or 10 seconds out of the total video).
I’m assuming that the best way to do this is in Flash, since that is the main way that people seem to be embedding videos these days and I believe that there are some open-source Flash video players. But I would be open to other ideas that will still work in a standard browser.
How tough would this be for someone who actually knew how to program in Flash?
YouTube actually does something similar to this with annotations, and apparently entirely in flash.
It could be ridiculously easy, to ridiculously hard, depending on where in the process the integration was started. I’ve done a good bit of more classic flash work, but nothing much more than some dinky ux dressing in the past decade.
At base level you could include the video player as an element in another flash file, and just manually add a new layer with the context links popping up when appropriate in the time line for the video. Tedious, but doable, and could be vulnerable to getting out of sync.
I have to believe there are some more integrated training-ish related flash media solutions for this from third parties, but I’ve not done any work in this area. Hopefully another commenter can provide more information.
you can use youtube, where there is option for anotations which are clickable, also there size and duration can be controlled easily.
this is definitely doable in flash – the client-side developers on our team have done a good amount of this stuff in flash/flex (the java-like language and libraries that compile to flash). today it is mostly used for serving overlay ads. if you’d like more details, i can ask one of the flex guys.
Easy as pie. You could define the clickable areas in an xml file and read it from the player. The format could be similar to :
click
startTime 1:00:10 /startTime
endTime 1:02:12 /endTime
positionX 230 /positionX
positionY 230 /positionY
height 100 /height
width 140 /width
link http://wherever /link
/click
click
…
And the player would include the clickable areas. Probably about a hundred LOC