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

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Mon Jan 17 16:30:42 PST 2011


On 1/17/11 6:04 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>  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.

I checked with some other users who aren't me, as a sanity check, and 
while all of them expected pausing a movie to buffer far enough to be 
able to play through when unpaused, none of them really expected the 
whole movie to buffer.  So it might in fact make the most sense to stick 
to buffering when paused until we're in the playthrough state and then 
stop, and have some other UI for making the moving available offline.

-Boris



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