[whatwg] Limiting the amount of downloaded but not watched video

Petr Baudis pasky at ucw.cz
Mon Jan 17 10:01:25 PST 2011


  Hi!

> A suggestion would be to implement / expose a property called "downloadBufferTarget". It would be the amount of video in seconds the browser tries to keep in the download buffer.

  I think this really is a policy decision that should be in the hands
of the user. But overally, it is much more sensible to have a setting
that is adaptive to the bandwidth of the user, allowing users to force
pre-caching the video but still avoiding bandwidth waste for those with
thick downlink.

  So, it would be more sensible to control downloadPlaybackRatio, e.g.
at default of 1.5 - do not download more than 1.5x as fast as you can
play the stuff back. This means the "pause and wait" scenario will be
unaffected (in that case, the real ratio is usually under 1) but
bandwidth will not be wasted in case you can download much faster than
play the video back.

				Petr "Pasky" Baudis


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