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

[Chris Pearce]

On 24/01/2011 12:32 a.m., Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
>>
>> Hmm.  To get this effect without preload=buffer, you could set 
>> preload=auto,
>> watch the buffered attribute to see when some data is actually 
>> downloaded,
>> then set it to preload=metadata to stop autoloading.  That's a minor 
>> hack,
>> and would need to watch out for browsers that don't autoload on
>> preload=auto, but it's probably good enough for the above cases.  
>> It'd only
>> work if runtime changes to preload are applied, which would also be 
>> needed
>> for scripts to implement "preload=auto only when paused".
>
> I intend to make that impossible by only allowing scripts to increase 
> the effective buffering strategy

FWIW, this is what we've implemented in Firefox; we only allow changes 
to the preload attribute after a load has started to increase the level 
of buffering.

Chris P.