The WHATWG specification has changed to add a 'startTime' attribute to the MediaElement. This needs to be implemented. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#dom-media-starttime

We're out of date with the current HTML video spec. The timeline (i.e. the values of HTMLMediaElement.currentTime) of a video/audio should go from the "earliest possible position" to the las possible position. We currently always have the playback position starting a 0 and ending at duration.

This seems like a somewhat unfortunate thing for the spec, I bet everyone's going to get it wrong because it won't be common. :( I can't help but wonder if it would be better to have a startTimeOffset property, so that .currentTime et al are all still have a timeline starting from 0, and if you want the "real" time you'd use .currentTime + .startTimeOffset. I'd also suspect we'll want the default video controls to normalize everything to 0 (.currentTime - .startTime), since it would be really confusing otherwise.

I totally agree with comment #3.

When this bug is fixed, the following test should pass: (Note that the tests current sniff the user agent for Firefox--hopefully that'll be fixed soon.) http://test.w3.org/html/tests/submission/Microsoft/video/video_008.htm

ietestcenter url: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5/MediaElements/media-rules-seeking.3.htm

Spec changed again, morphing this bug to track the current state.

Any new developments here?

I'd be reluctant to start implementing this part of the spec until things like multitrack, media controller, streams, etc are less of a moving target. It's likely to be in a bit of flux.

I'm adding 'initialTime' as part of the implementation of temporal media fragments in bug 648595.

I recently did some experimental work on synchronising events to live streams, and I patched Firefox to implement startOffsetTime for WebM streams. https://github.com/bbcrd/HTML5-MediaElement-startOffsetTime I do agree that the spec needs some clarification. My colleague Sean O'Halpin blogged about this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/02/what-does-currenttime-mean-in.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/01/implementing-startoffsettime-f.shtml

It's been some time and I guess the spec has stabilized. If there are still outstandind issues, did anybody file bugs?

This is no longer a requirement of the spec.