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

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:41:17 +0100, Robert O'Callahan  
<robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:

> One solution that could work here is to honour dynamic changes to  
> 'preload',
> so switching preload to 'none' would stop buffering. Then a script could  
> do
> that, for example, after the user has paused the video for ten seconds.  
> The
> script could also look at 'buffered' to make its decision.

The only difference between preload=none and preload=metadata is how much  
is fetched if the user doesn't interact at all with the video. Once the  
user has begun playing, I think the two mean the same thing: "please don't  
waste my bandwidth more than necessary". In other words, I think that for  
preload=metadata, browsers should be somewhat conservative even after  
playback has begun, not going all the way to the preload=auto behavior.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software