HTML5 audio - currentTime attribute inaccurate?

Question

I\'m playing around a bit with the HTML5 tag and I noticed some strange behaviour that has to do with the currentTime attribute.

Answer 1

First off, I'm not actually able to reproduce your problem on my machine, but I only have a short MP3 file handy at the moment, so that might be the issue. In any case, I think I can explain what's going on.

MP3 files (MPEG) are very simple streams and do not have absolute positional data within them. It isn't possible from reading the first part of the file to know at what byte offset some arbitrary frame begins. The media player seeks in the file by needle dropping. That is, it knows the size of the entire track and roughly how far into the track your time offset is. It guesses and begins decoding, picking up as soon as it synchronizes to the next frame header. This is an imprecise process.

Ogg is a more robust container and has time offsets built into its frame headers. Seeking in an Ogg file is much more straightforward.

The other issue is that most browsers that support MP3 do so only because the codec is already available on your system. Playing Ogg Vorbis and MP3 are usually completely different libraries with different APIs. While the web standards do a lot to provide a common abstraction, minor implementation details cause quirks like you are seeing.