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

Simon Pieters simonp at opera.com
Thu May 20 03:46:16 PDT 2010


On Thu, 20 May 2010 12:36:36 +0200, Simon Pieters <simonp at opera.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 20 May 2010 11:55:01 +0200, 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 bug report was about application/octet-stream *with parameters*,  
> e.g. application/octet-stream; codecs="theora, vorbis". The spec had the  
> requirement about application/octet-stream before that bug report.
>
>
>> 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?

The spec requires binary sniffing for all the types you support even  
without the application/octet-stream requirement, since a WebM file  
labelled as video/ogg should play if both video/webm and video/ogg are  
supported.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software


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