Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
> 3. @autobuffer="off" - the web page author cares and believes it would
> be a nuisance to the user to autobuffer this video and waste
> bandwidth, so the browser doesn't autobuffer - it this case, it may
> even make sense to not even try and initialise the decoding pipeline,
> but only display the poster frame, if possible (maybe the
> X-Content-Duration can help to display the video duration and that's
> all that's required?). I'm specifically thinking here about a Web page
> that has dozens of videos on it (e.g. as search results or for
> browsing a collection). It might not make sense to pre-buffer anything
> at all in such a case where playback is highly unlikely.

This comes back around to what Philip was saying before - is it really
best for the user to treat autobuffer=off any different than no
autobuffer at all?  *Will* a browser treat the two differently?  We
know that it's obviously often best to not autobuffer by default -
this has been established, and the automatic autobuffering that is
going on currently in some browsers is a bug.  Once that is fixed,
though, is it really worthwhile to do something fully different in
your situation 1 and 3?

I think I'd like to see video durations and such for all videos, even
if they're not autobuffered.  If you *really* don't want *anything*
video-related to download, the best thing to do is simply not put a
video in the page.  Just use a thumbnail with a link to the video,
possible with js to replace the thumbnail with a <video> element for
quicker turnaround (this has already been explored in this thread).

So, browser devs, do you think that, if autobuffer=off was supported
and present, you would treat it any differently than if autobuffer was
missing entirely?  Philip's already stated that he thinks not -
they'll be as conservative as possible by default, and won't get any
more conservative if you somehow specified "off" (obviously, Philip,
if I'm misrepresenting you, speak up).  Anyone else?

~TJ