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

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:06:30 +0100, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 5:57 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj at opera.com>  
> wrote:
>> I agree that there must exist a buffering strategy between  
>> strategy=metadata
>> and strategy=auto, but it's not clear that this must be exposed as a  
>> preload
>> state. The only difference between preload=metadata and preload=state3  
>> would
>> be that preload=state3 would expect the user to start playing soon and  
>> start
>> buffering in anticipation of that. Firefox has supported  
>> preload=metadata
>> (and earlier, lack of autobuffer attribute) for a long time. Is it a  
>> problem
>> in Firefox that playback is slow to start because too little was  
>> buffered
>> before suspending?
>
> I do think that in the basic case of a user pressing play on a video
> player, it's good to be able to make that respond instantly rather
> than waiting for a round-trip to begin playing.

Have you found this to be an actual problem in Firefox, which does suspend  
download after reaching HAVE_METADATA?

> Another use case is the background of a game, where you want the video
> ready to start when gameplay begins.

For that you should really use <audio preload=auto>, no?

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software