[whatwg] <video> application/octet-stream

[Mike Shaver]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Chris Double
<chris.double at double.co.nz> wrote:
> When content sniffing are we ignoring the mime type served by the
> server and always sniffing? If so then incorrectly configured servers
> can result in more downloaded data due to having to read the data
> looking for a valid video. For example:
>
> <video>
>  <source src='foo.ogg'>
>  <source src='foo.mkv'>
> </video>
>
> If the web browser doesn't support Ogg but does support matroska, and
> the server sends the video/ogg content type,  the browser can stop and
> go to the next source after downloading very little data.
>
> If the web browser is expected to ignore the mime type and content
> sniff it must see if 'foo.ogg' is a matroska file. According to the
> matroska spec arbitary ASCII data can be placed before the EBML
> identifier. This means reading a possible large amount of data (even
> the entire file) before being able to say that it's not a matroska
> file.

Assuming that such a browser were to exist, and that such content were
to exist (an Ogg file that did not contain any characters outside of
0x20-0x7F in the first few kilobytes), and that it were to be a
problem for that browser's users, I would probably suggest that the
developers of said browser implement basic Ogg support (enough to say
"this is Ogg, so we don't support it"), and go back to solving more
pressing problems!

Mike