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

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > If nothing else, I'm thinking things like "I would like to buffer up this
> > 3-hour-long-video so I can watch it on the plane, where my network
> bandwidth
> > will be precisely 0".  Definitely as use case I've had.
> >
>
> That's an important use case, but it feels like a very different one.  If
> you want to download hours of video for playing offline, you don't want to
> store that in a transient read-ahead buffer--you want to store it
> persistently on the disk, so it's not lost if a tab is closed, cache is
> cleared, etc.  It sounds more like a FileAPI use case than a buffering
> parameters one.
>

I disagree. If we don't address this use case, users can't watch videos
offline unless content providers explicitly provide such a mechanism using
File API, which will undermine usability significantly.

- Ryosuke