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

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 1/17/11 4:25 PM, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> That's an important use case, but it feels like a very different one.

 From a user's point of view it's really not.

> 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.

Users don't clear their cache.

> It sounds more like a FileAPI use case than a buffering parameters one.

 From a user's perspective (which is what I'm speaking as here), it 
doesn't matter what the technology is.  The point is that there is 
prevalent UI out there right now where pausing a moving will keep 
buffering it up and then you can watch it later.  This is just as true 
for 2-hour movies as it is for 2-minute ones, last I checked.

So one question is whether this is a UI that we want to support, given 
existing user familiarity with it.  If so, there are separate questions 
about how to support it, of course.

-Boris