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

[Roger Hågensen]

  On 2010-09-14 08:37, Julian Reschke wrote:
> On 13.09.2010 23:51, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>> ...
>>> And for heavens sake, do not specify any sniffing as "official".
>>> Instead, explicitly specify all sniffing as UA specific and possibly
>>> suggest that UAs should inform the user that content is broken and the
>>> current rendering is best effort if any sniffing is required.
>>
>> This is totally incompatible with the compelling interoperability and
>> security benefits of all browsers using the exact same sniffing
>> algorithm.
>> ...
>
> Again, there's more than browsers. And even for <video> in browsers, 
> the actual component playing the video may not be part of the browser 
> at all.
>
> So there's *much* more that would need to implement the "exact same 
> sniffing".
>
> Has anybody talked to the people responsible for VLC, Windows Media 
> Player, and Quicktime?
>
> Best regards, Julian
>
>

Good question, I can only speak for my self as a developer but I imagine 
that anything that allows a media player to stop sniffing "sooner" in a 
file is very welcome indeed
as that saves resources (memory, disk access, faster initialization of 
the codec and user related interface feedback, etc.)
Legacy files will always be an issue obviously, but there is no reason 
to let future files remain just as "difficult", eventually legacy files 
will vanish or be transcoded or have their beginning "patched" to take 
advantage of it.
(in the case of my proposal one could easily add it by hand using a hex 
editor, so it's certainly not difficult to support in that regard.)

-- 
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://EmSai.net/