[whatwg] HTML5 video <source> dimensions and bitrate

[Zachary Ozer]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's good to have thought this through. I agree, this isn't a workable
> solution, since the whole bandwidth switching logic is introduced into the
> browsers, when in fact it should happen in the media framework with
> information from the network stack without a need for the Web page to even
> be aware of this. After all, it's really different versions of the same
> resource that we are dealing with. That's also what happens in adaptive HTTP
> streaming solutions of Apple, MS, Adobe and MPEG-4.

Absolutely - though these types of solutions are generally out of the
reach of the average publisher. Even in that case, the server would
(probably) want information about dropped frames from the client.

> So, to generalise this, I agree there should be a solution such as what
> Chris Double is suggesting with an additional resource describing what files
> can be switched between and then JavaScript doing the switching. This could
> eventually also be introduced into HTML5, if it's done with the same
> additional resource format for all video formats. In this case, would you
> still require an additional attribute?

We do this currently with SMIL files, which have all the necessary
information. In that case the only thing I could imagine be necessary
is some sort of flag to indicate that the file listed as the src isn't
the actual file to be played, but rather a list of resources.