[html5] Autoplay and preload insufficient for proper video playback.

[Herman Hassel]

  On 24.08.2010 01:17, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jun 2010, Herman Hassel wrote:
>> I keep finding the media attributes "preload" and "autoplay"
>> insufficient for video playback.
> Before considering proposed alternatives, could you elaborate on how
> "preload" is insufficient? (It's impossible for me to evaluate how the
> proposed alternatives are better without knowing how the existing
> solutions are bad!)
Sure! At the moment I need to set preload to "none" or "metadata". Often 
we do use more than one video or audio element on the same page, and we 
do want the initial load of each page to be as low as possible. We do 
have some visitors with low bandwidth, or people who use their phones 
and are charged by their ISP by the MB. If we had only high bandwidth 
users and few elements on a page, we'd just use auto. We don't limit our 
media files to ranges or anything like that, we just want our users to 
have the best possible experience viewing the videos provided on the 
websites we make.

Whenever an end user starts a video or audio element that hasn't been 
preloaded, and the end user doesn't have good enough bandwidth to match 
the progressive download of the video file, we tend to get very 
stuttered and broken video for the first seconds, until either the speed 
of the stream picks up or the end users pause the playback themselves 
and wait for it to buffer up a bit. Now with audio this isn't such a big 
issue since the KB/s rate of audio files is so much smaller, but it's 
very noticeable with video.

I can also imagine scenarios where autoplay is set to "on" but the end 
user has low bandwidth, or scenarios where preload is set to "auto" but 
the end user clicks the play button too fast for the file to load. (yes, 
some of our end users are ninja's!)
We had the same issue with the experience of progressively downloaded 
media years ago, when I first started our early experiments with flash 
video (before every user had broadband), that was until we set the 
buffer attribute in flash, which fixed the whole issue.

It's in the few starting seconds of cases like this that the end user 
experience would be enhanced by us having a buffer attribute in our 
toolbox. We need to make sure a few seconds of a media file always gets 
loaded before any actual playback begins. The buffer attribute wouldn't 
break anything already in place, it would only enhance the attributes 
already existing. :)

-- 
Herman Hassel
Agrabush Design

mail:    herman at agrabush.com
twitter: http://twitter.com/agrabush