[whatwg] Video with MIME type application/octet-stream

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Thu, 20 May 2010 17:59:42 +0800, Robert O'Callahan  
<robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:

> On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 9:55 PM, Robert O'Callahan  
> <robert at ocallahan.org>wrote:
>
>> I just became aware that application/octet-stream is excluded from  
>> being a
>> type "the user agent knows it cannot render".
>>
>> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#a-type-that-the-user-agent-knows-it-cannot-render
>> Apparently this was done in response to a bug report:
>> http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7977
>> Neither the bug report nor the editor's response give any indication why
>> this change was made.
>>
>> This change means files served with application/octet-stream will make  
>> it
>> all the way to the step "If the media  
>> data<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#media-data>can  
>> be fetched but is found by inspection to be in an unsupported format
>> ...", so implementations have to add support for binary sniffing for  
>> all the
>> types they support. We didn't need this before in Gecko. What was the
>> motivation for adding this implementation requirement?
>>
>
> Hmm. I guess it doesn't add any implementation requirements beyond what  
> you
> need to handle the complete absence of a Content-Type (which we currently
> don't handle, but I suppose we should). So this isn't really a problem.
>
> I'd still like to know why application/octet-stream has been added here,
> though.

For the record, Opera implements canPlayType("application/octet-stream")  
and canPlayType("application/octet-stream; codecs=foo") as per spec  
("maybe" and "" respectively), but I don't have any strong opinions about  
it.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software