[whatwg] <video> application/octet-stream

[Chris Double]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 6:10 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
> I don't like sniffing any more than the next guy, but the work needed to
> properly MIME label a modern media format (with the whole container and
> multiple streams thing) is ... excessive.  I doubt anyone's going to do it,
> so we're really talking about just labeling the container format, right?

Yes, in the majority of cases the MIME type will be for the container
format. We'd treat the MIME type much like canPlayType in that we'd
try to play any 'maybe' result from that MIME type I expect.

You might say "Hey, but aren't you content sniffing then to find the
codecs" and you'd be right. But in this case we're respecting the MIME
type sent by the server - it tells the browser to whatever level of
detail it wants (including codecs if needed) what type it is sending.
If the server sends 'text/plain' or 'video/x-matroska' I wouldn't
expect a browsers to sniff it for Ogg content.

As I mentioned in a previous email, the sniffing could result in a
reasonable amount of data being consumed. I'm sure people who run
sites that share HTML 5 video would appreciate browsers not consuming
data bandwidth to sniff files that they've already specified as being
something the browser doesn't support.

Chris.
-- 
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