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

[Chris Pearce]

On 18/01/2011 10:05 a.m., Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>
> If instead the bandwidth is the limiting factor, we do want to allow
> buffering ahead a fair bit such that we don't end up in a "buffering"
> state for the user too often. In this case, a dependency on the
> playback rate as suggested by Petr might make sense. What we really
> need though is to make the download buffer increasingly larger the
> lower the available bandwidth and the higher the average bitrate of
> the video. I believe we are starting to see such
> measurements/statistics be introduced into HTML5 video, so these
> should help Web authors set the correct download buffer size.
>

Perhaps we should only honour the downloadBufferTarget (or whatever 
measure we use) when the media is in readyState HAVE_ENOUGH_DATA, i.e. 
if we're downloading at a rate greater than what we require to playback 
in real time? That way we can afford to stop the download without 
introducing pauses to buffer more data, but we won't affect people on 
slow connections who want to buffer the media in its entirety in order 
to prevent pauses to buffer.


Chris Pearce.