Towards a Media Fragment URI Aware User Agent

The W3C's Media Fragments URI 1.0 specification provides for a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media fragments on the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Thus, a key requirement is for the User Agent (UA) to efficiently retrieve media fragments identified by URIs from the regular media server over the HTTP protocol. This paper addresses the issue of how to construct a Media Fragment URI aware UA. We propose an approach for achieving such a UA, focusing on fully indexable container formats. Our approach consists of a set of algorithms capable of performing URI-based media fragment retrieval. Algorithm implementation and experimental results show that our approach is achievable and is able to greatly reduce time and bandwidth costs compared to the traditional approach of downloading the entire media resource.