In sign language videos in digital form, videos normally start automatically and loop until the person leaves the page. One possibility is that perhaps looping be the default. Perhaps this could be handled the same way that you implement the “a page at a time” audio recording option–a check box to control whether you want the video to loop or not.
This strikes me more as a user setting (on Bloom Reader) than an author setting (in Bloom). Do you agree?
It could be. That would put the users in control of this and save the author the trouble. Presumably, a reader would set this switch globally and not have mess with it again.
Most users seem to expect that a video will start automatically and loop, when presented on a web page, especially one that includes text. And, people will take their expectations about web pages with them when they look at Bloom Reader. I notice that that seems to be what is being done for hearing people on news sites too, when a video accompanies a news story. If you want to make it extremely customizable, I’d say Bloom’s default should be to loop automatically (with a short pause between each repetition). Then, the author/publisher could set a different behavior as the default for that book (or each video), and finally, the user would be able to override that. My gut feeling, though, is that the users would not want to be bothered with having that control, and would prefer to just let the author decide. I’d suggest first implementing it either as always looping, or give the author the ability to turn that off, and then see if users want to have control.
One other thing: One way to give the user control is for the author to specify that each video could be presented with a full set of video controls. This might be appropriate if there is a longer video on a page (more than a few seconds).