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Let's look at how Firefox and Chrome differ in the way they interpret the 'earliest seekable time of the media resource' as defined in the .

As we'll see below, Firefox defines this as the time the browser joins the stream, whereas Chrome defines it as the time the stream started. We'll now look at these interpretations in detail.

The diagram below shows the salient points on the timeline.

In Firefox, the currentTime attribute is interpreted as the offset into the stream from the time the browser joined the stream. In terms of the diagram above that is currentTime = t_p - t_j.

If currentTime were the only information available to us, we could not implement startOffsetTime as we would have lost the information telling us how far from the stream start t_j is. Fortunately for us, Firefox maintains an internal variable called startTime which measures the interval from the beginning of the stream, i.e. t_j - t_s.

So, using the DateUTC field from the WebM header, we can calculate startOffsetTime as startOffsetTime = DateUTC + startTime.

To calculate actual current stream time, we simply add currentTime to startOffsetTime.

Chrome has a different interpretation of the 'earliest seekable time of the media resource' in that it implements currentTime = t_p - t_s, i.e. currentTime is the offset from the time the stream started streaming. This would appear to make things easier for us as startOffsetTime is then simply the DateUTC read from the WebM header. However, there is a problem here. The specification states:

In the absence of an explicit timeline, the zero time on the media timeline should correspond to the first frame of the media resource. For static audio and video files this is generally trivial. For streaming resources, if the user agent will be able to seek to an earlier point than the first frame originally provided by the server, then the zero time should correspond to the earliest seekable time of the media resource; otherwise, it should correspond to the first frame received from the server (the point in the media resource at which the user agent began receiving the stream).

Given that neither browser can seek earlier than the first frame they receive, this implies that Firefox has made the correct interpretation of currentTime. Chrome's interpretation appears to be that zero on the timeline represents the earliest position in the stream. However, we agree with Firefox that the specification implies that zero should represent the earliest seekable position in the stream.

There seems to be some confusion here in how the HTML5 media elements specification is dealing with logical stream addressing versus physical stream addressing. The excerpt above talks about a user agent being able to "seek to an earlier point than the first frame originally provided by the server" but does not explain how this could possibly happen without communication back to the server, in which case we are effectively dealing with a request for a different physical resource. At the very least, the fact that the Firefox and Chrome teams came up with different interpretations shows that this part of the specification would benefit from clarification.