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

[Glenn Maynard]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Maybe so, but the read-ahead buffer doesn't seem like a sensible place to
address this.  If I download a 3-hour video for a plane, it's not acceptable
for that video to no longer be available if I restart my computer or close a
tab.

-- 
Glenn Maynard