Chapter Extension

Chapters are a means of providing direct and semantically relevant navigation points for a media file. On particular use case are so-called "enhanced podcasts", i.e. audio files with additional chapter markers.

Chapters are typically provided for a recorded file, not for a live resource.

Since chapters are used for navigation - in particular to avoid having to listen to large amounts of undesired content in order to get to desired content - it is important that the information about chapters is available at the start of a media file to be able to be displayed without having to decode the media file. Therefore, we regard chapters as header-style metadata.

Header-style metadata has traditionally been transported in VorbisComment headers inside Ogg.

We therefore propose an extensions to VorbisComment for transporting chapters. We introduce VorbisComment fields called CHAPTERxxx and CHAPTERxxxNAME with xxx being a number between 000 and 999. We assume 1000 chapters to be sufficient.

An example chapter file with two sequential chapters:

 CHAPTER001=00:00:00.000-00:05:00.000
 CHAPTER001NAME=Chapter 1
 CHAPTER002=00:05:00.000-00:10:00.000
 CHAPTER002NAME=Chapter 2

Another example chapter file with a chapter and three hierarchically structured subchapters:

 CHAPTER001=00:00:00.000-00:06:00.000
 CHAPTER001NAME=Chapter 1
 CHAPTER002=00:00:00.000-00:02:00.000
 CHAPTER002NAME=Chapter 1.1
 CHAPTER003=00:00:02.000-00:04:00.000
 CHAPTER003NAME=Chapter 1.2
 CHAPTER004=00:00:04.000-00:06:00.000
 CHAPTER004NAME=Chapter 1.3

This should basically support the same input format that Matroska chapters support, too.

A more modern means of specifying chapters is through WebVTT files that use cues with chapter titles.